


In the Midst of Life

by cleodoxa



Category: Bandom, My Chemical Romance, Panic! at the Disco
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Alternate Universe - Victorian, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-13
Updated: 2010-07-13
Packaged: 2017-10-10 13:13:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 47,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/100161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cleodoxa/pseuds/cleodoxa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Victorian vampire au.  In which Ryan and Spencer are most unhappy vampires and meet Gerard, a medium who insists on helping them, and Brendon, who isn't quite so keen on helping them but soon becomes interested in Ryan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

  
  
  
  
  


**Entry tags:**

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[bandom](http://cleodoxa.livejournal.com/tag/bandom), [bbb](http://cleodoxa.livejournal.com/tag/bbb), [fic](http://cleodoxa.livejournal.com/tag/fic), [in the midst of life](http://cleodoxa.livejournal.com/tag/in%20the%20midst%20of%20life)  
  
  
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**In the Midst of Life**

**Band(s): Panic-centric with appearances from members of other bands.**  
**Pairing(s): Ryan/Brendon, some Ryan/Jon, background Spencer/Greta, Gerard/Lyn-Z**  
**Rating/Warnings: NC-17**  
**Summary:** Victorian vampire au. In which Ryan and Spencer are most unhappy vampires and Gerard tries to help them.

Thank you very much indeed to [](http://stephanometra.livejournal.com/profile)[**stephanometra**](http://stephanometra.livejournal.com/) for beta reading.

The art for this fic can be found [here](http://cleodoxa.livejournal.com/2438.html#cutid1), and the mix [here](http://cleodoxa.livejournal.com/2616.html#cutid1)

It is as if they glide down the street rather than walk, measured and slow, step by step. No one sees them, but there they are, illuminated for a moment as they pass under the light of a street lamp. The yellow light gleams off their hair, hiding the actual colour and showing only the dull sheen of it, loose to the shoulders on each. The black lace ruff round the man's neck is a clear silhouette, and the skirt of the woman's burgundy-coloured silk dress is kicked back into the pool of light just as the woman leaves it.

Ahead of them is a man. William and Victoria haven't yet compiled a personal description of any great detail, but his gait seems that of the youthful drunkard. His wispy hair becomes a bright halo of fluff as he too steps in and out of the intermittent light. Perhaps his meandering is not drunkenness. Perhaps he is rich, perhaps poor. No one here cares. Careful, steady steps take the two closer to him as they make their way towards him, much faster than he makes his away from them.

They are at his back now, and this is the lovely bit, when they grasp their victim by the shoulder, hard usually, though sometimes they might rest their hand on their shoulder with a tender flutter of fingers. Then they spin them round to face them so they sprawl, caught off balance. It is that first moment of physical overpowering that makes them feel like they are _taking_ this person, like you might take a lover, the only lover for you, in some dream of ultimate bliss. Or like _they_ are taken, in those wriggling, alarming dreams their unconscious fishes up from time to time. Just that one first touch, it's better even than what comes after, when they bite in and feel their mouth fill with blood.

Victoria holds the man against her, he and William swooning into her as William leans in and bites first. He gulps as the blood flows down his throat, full enough to choke, and trickles over his lips. Then he licks, careful to savour, like someone lingering over fine wine. William breaks off after only a little while, and Victoria moves her head down to the man's broken throat. He is quite adrift with terror. Sometimes when their victims are like this, Victoria and William are held in a dreamy kind of hypnosis by their own spell, though it is when they struggle and bite back like mad weasels that they feel they are perfect.

Victoria sucks at the wound for a while before raising her head. "Shall we have all of him? I really don't feel like finding another tonight." William hesitates. For all that this is what they _do_, sometimes they succumb to the temptation to make things easy. Wary of leaving an obvious trail of corpses in their wake, they usually feed from two or three people a night, which increases the amount of stalking pleasure, anyway. Sometimes though, a careless mood lights upon them and smothers that meticulous, pretentious pleasure. Nothing less than the thick, inebriating glee of drinking a person all up will do.

"Very well," says William, and unknown to the man, his chance at being abandoned to stagger on his drunken way blinks out, as William takes another turn. They pull away from him as a cab suddenly clatters through the street, but neither driver nor passenger seems to perceive anything alarming.

When the man has fled into the infinite beyond and there is only a corpse left on their hands, they don't resist further carelessness.

"We haven't left one behind for ages," William says, wheedling, though Victoria needs no coaxing.

"It's only cautious, actually," she says. "We can't be certain he doesn't know of that house. Better to leave a corpse where he might hear of it than find ourselves lumbered with it and faced with him."

They are pursued off and on themselves. It brings a certain element to – to life. They leave the man's body behind, sprawling across the pavement as Victoria and William wander off in search of their destination. It is nearby, but they feel more than a little heady and addled from the blood they've ingested. They've been walking peevishly up and down a particular road for some time before Victoria cries, "But this is the road it's in, isn't it?" They stalk the street with redoubled vim, peering at each house in turn. They have forgotten the exact location of their own house, one of many spares they keep in various countries. They haven't visited it in many years, and are sure only that they will know when they see it.

It is right at the end of the street, unattached to any other building, the derelict, unoccupied black sheep of a neighbourhood of large, grand houses. William and Victoria left an upstairs window open and all other entrances boarded up. Vampires are frail corpses, tenuously maintained, but then they also brim with harsh, barbarous strength and energy when replete, like cannibals who gain the qualities of their enemies when they take them into their bodies. These vampires clamber easily up the wall to the open window.

"It smells well enough," William says brightly. They use their houses as repositories for dead bodies, which is why they use a rotatary system and are only returning to this one after a long while. They go down to the dining room, where, without conscious irony, they had laid the corpses. They trot down the stairs, heads jerking stiffly from side to side in apprehension of their enemy.

"All down to bone!" Victoria says, twitching at the cloth-wrapped jumble piled onto the long table. Domestic concerns settled, William and Victoria trail around the ground floor. "I hope we stay in London for a while," says Victoria. "We might easily see them on the street."

"We would have to spend a great part of the night looking out," says William. "I know, I know, it is not as if we have much else to do."

"We should develop a system," says Victoria, "and obtain a map of the streets of London."

"I detest maps," William says with unwonted vehemence. The sixteenth century was an ill preparation for map-reading. He shifts topics: "I wish we could thread these teeth. If we pulled them out …"

"Whose – oh, _them_. We might, I suppose. What do you think about trying acid baths on the rest? It's beginning to work on my nerves having them squirreled away everywhere; we never remember which lot are at what stage. And it is such a tell-tale."

"If you like, though it seems very time-consuming."

"William, you just said we have not much else to do. What else are you going to do with your time? And what is threading teeth, if it comes to that? Though I would rather like to wear ropes of teeth around my neck. I should look like a savage goddess. Not much good to you with your ruff."

William wears his ruff to cover his neck, badly scarred after being Turned with savagery. "I could braid them in my hair," he says.

"If you like to look a perfect idiot."

* *

In London, not particularly near William and Victoria, is an attic. It is not the kind of attic that is treated like a respectable part of the house, nor has it ever been. It doesn't have a proper ceiling, just a few haphazard beams and planks criss-crossing a couple of inches above head level – if one doesn't happen to be tall. The walls are brick on one side and stone on the other, not plaster. Most of the floor space is taken up with heaps of household jumble no one will find a use for again, towering up to poke through the planks. Behind a barrier of boxes and upturned furniture, and in front of the window, are two crumpled heaps of blankets. A young man lies curled up in one, a peevish line between his eyebrows; the attic is chilly on this not particularly warm spring night, and his hands are mottled yellow and pink with poor circulation as he rubs them together for warmth.

Now something mars the dark window's reflection of the room and Ryan himself. The vision of another young man's head, bearded, briefly swims behind it before the sash is yanked up and the man rolls onto the floor.

Without speaking, Spencer brandishes the stone hot water bottle he is clutching – the largest container they have - and Ryan sits up, clasping his knees. There are a few glass bottles scattered about the blankets; Spencer takes one, uncorks the stone bottle, and he and Ryan watch unenthusiastically as the blood glugs into the other bottle. When it is full and not before, Ryan pushes his own bottle at Spencer. They sit for a while, breathing in as if in preparation before drinking. It's something that takes almost a quarter of an hour, off and on, shuddering and bowing heads before another bout. The blood is from a butcher's shop Spencer has an agreement with, and it is clotted, not particularly fresh, and cold. Sometimes they try to make a little fire to warm it through, but these little fires are dangerous, firstly because they find them difficult to contain, and secondly the smoke might seep into the rest of the house and alert someone to their presence. They can never get the blood anything more than tepid anyway, so it hardly seems worth the risk.

There is plenty of blood left in the hot water bottle, but Spencer replaces the stopper,and neither of them take any more. They can never bring themselves to drink quite enough, and it makes them cold and languid. They both look as if they are waking up now, though, as Ryan gets out a sticky paper bag with two buns in it they'd saved. They sigh with satisfaction at biting in; they can digest food when full with blood but don't need it, where they do need blood. It is really only the promise of the bun afterwards that keeps them drinking; they might easily let it slide, otherwise.

After eating, they huddle back down into their blankets, propped up on their elbows. When finally they speak, it is to play a game. They undertake to talk about boots, their conversation constricted by alphabetical considerations.

"Leather is such a familiar smell, yet it would not be if boots and shoes were not made of it."

"Many boots make the noise that can be heard when many people march together, rather than the feet marching inside them."

"Never wear boots that are too small, it is very bad for you."

"One thinks of the boot as an item of itself, and never remembers that it is comprised of pieces sewn together."

Outside, the attic window glows dimly in a dark house, the small circle of wavering light inside a vaguely apposite metaphor for the littleness of their lives – sickly little corpses, the spirit in them guttering low.

* *

The house below them is a boarding-house; the proprietor, one Gerard Way. It is certainly not the least shabby, dismal and haphazard establishment in London: when wondering if it is the worst, one must remember that contrary to facile proverb, things can always get worse. A great deal of the explanation for this state of affairs lies in the fact that Mr Way thinks of himself more as another lodger in the place than its landlord. Mr Way the younger, his brother, could also be considered its landlord – he does do a few things about the place – but again, he has his own concerns. There are also a cook and a maid, but neither of them are very good at their own jobs, let alone taking on further, proprietary duties.

At this moment, Gerard is at a house a great deal grander and more pleasant than his own, about to take part in a séance. He is the medium, and he feels both the anticipation of challenge and an edge of dis-ease. Yet inside the fear, there is also the anticipation of pleasure – enjoyment, like a flower blooming within the wrapping around its stem. Gerard's mind feels as if it ricochets through attitudes, unable to settle. He doesn't know if he sits down only to venture off on a childishly indulgent adventure inside his mind, entirely self-interested, or to make grand ethereal connections with the bourne from which no traveller returns. He doesn't know, yet there is a world (worlds) of difference between. Thus Gerard might be in the Sanders' drawing room, but he doesn't know where _he_ is.

"Do you use spirit controls?" Mr. Sanders asks him curiously.

"Oh yes." Several people in the room answer for him. Most of the people here, though not his hosts, are familiar with his séances.

"There's a wolf and a little girl," Gerard says, and as always he wants to roll up his eyes with exasperation at the sound of his voice in this setting. He tries to make the sound deeper and clearer, rounding the vowels instead of stretching them, and tapping all the consonants, but it is still the nasally sound of all pretentious, common little men. He always wonders why they do not take him for a charlatan.

"I cannot discover their names. I do not think the child was ever a real child, or the wolf a real wolf. I speak _to_ the little girl, mostly, and when I am deeply entranced, _as_ the wolf. I believe the wolf is representative of the wilder, deeper, more inhuman regions of death. What he says may seem nonsensical, but it will be true. The little girl is tricksier."

"It is she who brings unruly spirits," someone says.

"I speak to the dead through her, and they are often inane and innocuous except for those listeners who feel a chill of recognition. But things can take a vicious turn."

"She often expresses herself through writing" – someone else, quite unable to remain quiet when they know the answer.

"And you do not experience manifestations, is that correct?" asks Mr. Sanders.

"Indeed," says Gerard. "I am afraid that my psychical powers do not allow the strain. The one occasion on which I attempted this feat, I succeeded but briefly – or at least, a glimmering white figure appeared, but it knocked over the table and I fell entirely unconscious. According to reports, the figure then tipped up its face to Heaven and slowly rose through the ceiling in imitation of the Virgin's ascent to Heaven, leaving behind a cacophony of hideous shrieks. Emanating from no visible source," he adds.

This lack of manifestation constitutes part of Gerard's mediumistic appeal. His patrons never have to deal with the complicated business of locking him in a cupboard so all parties might be satisfied there was no trickery afoot. The air of suspicion that pervades spiritualism these days is so vulgar, and despite all precautions there are so many rumours of deceit and sometimes outright discovery. And the medium is really the focal point of the affair; the audience wants to know what they are doing, what people look like when they grapple with the ineffable. Gerard's repetoire lacking manifestations, what remains was mostly the ineffable. That leaves aside the issue of physical proof, which is the crisis point of the whole exercise, and therefore something to at once hunt down and shrink from.

Of course, Gerard would have _liked_ to conjure ectoplasmic phenomena for his audience, but he could not for the life of him fathom how. If one were shut up in a cupboard, hands bound, with a crowd of people in the room beyond presumably gazing hard at said cupboard, he could not imagine how one might then get out and flit about draped in reams of white fabric, giving one's audience the impression that one were a real live ghost. And then there would be the business of getting back in one's cupboard when they came to open it, still bound, and no cheesecloth in sight. Gerard thought his heart should burst if he did know enough to attempt it. But he can't help but dwell on such antics, because they seem so much to represent "real" spiritualism to so many people.

There was obviously some secret sect of mediums where this information was discovered to initiates, but Gerard had certainly never gained admittance to any such society. He fell into spiritualism at random, through a woman who had struck up conversation with him at church. (It had been Christmas, and she'd thought he looked in need of enlightenment.) This is probably why Gerard never feels as if he knows what he is doing. Sometimes he wonders if it is only the ones who are caught who are guilty of artifice. Sometimes he wonders if all the other mediums believe that none of it is true. Both of these thoughts make him despair, in a way that doesn't alter the fact that he also feels, defiantly, that perhaps it is a good thing he cannot quite determine which category he falls into. He need not be forced to deal with the implications of either.

"Are you sure you did not attempt more than once?" asks Mrs. Sanders. "I am sure I have heard of similar incidents when something was upset . . ."

"Er, no," says Gerard. "On a couple of occasions, I did become over-excited and knock the candle over. Which did create some confusion. Now I request that we sit in darkness, or place the candle on some other surface."

Another thing that creates a niche for Gerard is that he is a man. Almost all mediums are women, young attractive ones at that. Some people, who feel their interest to be a little more scientific, or at least less prurient than most, wish to avoid the usual spectacle. The appeal of that spectacle lies in dealing with a young, pretty girl, who might in another life have been an actress, in contemplating her otherworldliness and thinking of her contending with both dangerous forces, so much stronger than herself, and the sweet serenity possessed by the dear departed. With Gerard, a shabby young man the social inferior of all other parties involved, unpolished in every way, the focus is only on what he does. He makes people feel as if they are afloat the raft of earthly life, the sea of the great beyond around them and beneath them, as he tells it. The fun of yearning for the supernatural is served plain.

Eventually the company all seat themselves around the large, glossy round table. The lights are put out, one candle left alight which Mrs. Jessett, a veteran of Gerard's séances, holds carefully aloft while everyone shuffles about, making sure they are quite settled. Then she blows out the candle and everyone links hands in the dark. The next moment they all burst out into the Hallelujah Chorus, which Gerard always makes them sing at the beginning of séances. He says the way the sound of the word Hallelujah swells makes his sense peel adrift from his body. Also, it distracts them from Gerard in those getting-started moments. He likes the pleasure they take in singing it; the merry fluting of those who have always been told they have a fine voice, the joyous blarings of those not usually allowed to sing, and the ones self-conscious about the sound they make. The last make themselves conspicuous by saying the words instead of singing them, falling like cold drops of water into the rippling circles of the group's voices.

Gerard is sat next to Mrs. Sanders and a young man named Walter Panderson. Mr. Panderson is enjoying his own rich baritone. He clasps their hands and mouths the word "Hallelujah" to himself a few times. He is laughing inside, yet ready and waiting for sincerity. Today he decides not to do the table-rapping and so on, at least not at once. Table-rapping is fraud, plain and simple, though he is always hopeful something will move before he moves it. He can't bale out entirely the flood of craven self-indulgence that wonders how he would know if his impulses were being borrowed. With the other things, the automatic writing and the channelling, Gerard does not know. He tries to know and it exhausts him; grubbing about in his head and as far as he can get outside it for any sign.

"Words falling through me," Gerard mutters. "Something is finding me . . . it is beautiful but it is all gone . . . no it isn't, I can see it from this angle."

This is what he always does; he reaches out with a determination born of playacting the conviction he will find something. There never seems to be enough space between his call, when he says he can see something, and its answer, when he can see something and people seem to know what he means when he tells them about it. Gerard cannot discern whether it is merely something that dwells in one cell of himself calling back in response to something it hears through the walls. His perturbation on this varies according to what he comes out with. Sometimes things are disturbing enough to make him hope that he is not their source. More often it appears that either he or the dead are astoundingly dull – really, he would not have guessed either had such a preoccupation with spoons and vases. He hopes death has more to offer than a vantage-point over earth, from which to watch one's loved ones and their vase related activities.

Now, though, Gerard is coming upon something different.

Gerard can see something that is beautiful but all gone; a great flare of deep red. The red is so vivid and biting it makes him think of pain, yet there is something of feminine beauty in it. It is performing some passionate action in existing, this bright flare – it is like red skirts gathered up and spinning out in a wild dance, but what it is really doing is burning away – it _has_ burnt away, what Gerard is seeing is the crisis point of its immolation. Only then it seems to wring itself out, so that another layer flutters in spirals around the burning, red petals or perhaps autumn leaves in pretty pointed shapes.

"It hurts, but it wants to – it makes me feel like a grand, existing thing – I want to tell Walter!"

Walter's hand jerks in Gerard's. "I only know one dead person," he whispers, and it is plain he is not sure he wants to talk to that person.

"I never said anything to you, Walter; I didn't tell you, and now I have nothing to tell you with. I wanted so much to flaunt myself in front of you, for you to look at me and see me. My words are rising up out of death to reach you, like skeletons struggling out of their tombs. My love, and my words still in my mouth, they reanimate even what is not there. My love is inside my words like bone inside the skin . . . I used to think about your _bones_, your ribs . . . if you took your clothes off there would be those solid curving strips of bone, in between the hollowness and over your heart. And your skin would cover them almost smoothly but there would be shadows where the birdcage showed through, and I could have traced them with my tongue. My love hangs off me like water, but it is frozen, like icicles welling off my fingertips. I _need_ you to feel my skin, because my love isn't selfless and disinterested like it ought to be. I conjure you to see me, to know me, to have me . . . I'd _spread my legs_ for you, you know . . .This is Marigold, by the by, but I'm sure you knew. But I have no skin –" "Well, she _might_, Gerard could not help thinking. Granted, she didn't have it with her. "-and I can't do what I am _for_ and I am run mad with it. My darling, my lamb, my dove, my love, I can't tell you how I envy you your skin, and your life. You have time, something to step out onto, to do things differently with, and I am all alone here, and I am a pretentious _nothing_ saying I, because I am not anything ... and no matter how I try, I cannot reach you, because I have lost myself and I am terrified."

Gerard is banging his fists on the table; he realises Mrs. Sanders and Mr. Panderson are wincing and trying to free their hands, and ceases. The voice – his voice? – had been ardent, strident and thick with longing. The last words, however, had been high, thin and shaking. The circle looks around itself big-eyed, a little frightened and shocked but exactly satisfied. This is what they came for, to hear from the land of the dead what might not be said in the land of the living. But Gerard is wondering for the first time what good it can do the dead to speak, at least when it is the living they have business with.

"Was that the wolf or the little girl?" asks Mr. Sanders.

"I don't know," Gerard says through numb lips. "I don't usually speak _as_ spirits."

Mr. Panderson sits hunched forward, his hands cupped round his mouth and his face blank.

"Would you like some wine?" Mrs. Sanders asks Gerard.

"Water," he says. Mr. Panderson drinks from a glass of water, too, and he and Gerard depart almost together, leaving the others to talk tentatively among themselves.

Gerard walks home. Nothing like this has happened before – he is quite certain that all that was this Marigold person. He is overwhelmed by this proof that such enormities are real. Gerard is a different person now, from who he thought, because he has called a dead person from the abyss to speak their words through him. He is a person that can be used that way. Gerard thinks he likes that, but he also wishes Marigold had left him alone. She affirms everything he ever thought about dead people, why he does this, but he would now not feel so shocked if that veil had not been blown aside. He feels passionately for dead people, because they are pinned by their lives – nothing can now be changed. They are pinned but they are also cut adrift and lost. Lethe, Gerard thinks vaguely. Now one has bobbed up, drowning and waving and choking at him in personal appeal to Walter, if not to him. He'd wanted to give them the chance to bob up, but now he doesn't much like being used for such hopelessness. How can anyone palliate death? What could the hapless Walter do for Marigold the dead?

When he arrives home, he sits in the dining room to think some more. One of the boarders comes in to search for his pen, and startles him. It is one of the young men come to London to seek their fortune, and may yet do so, but is at present he is the sort of person who boards here. The young man finds his pen; an inveterate letter writer, he left it at the table at breakfast at breakfast. After complaining about the maid, as do all the boarders on sighting the Ways, he says, "I can hear something moving around in the attic. Rats, I suppose, or pigeons. Perhaps you would be so good as to investigate, and set a trap? It disturbs my sleep."

"Perhaps I would," says Gerard. He sits some more after the lodger leaves. Then Michael and Gabriel Saporta come through the dark dining room, and he starts.

"I forgot you were out for the night."

"Why are you sitting in the dark?" asks Michael. "Come and have some cocoa."

"I had a difficult séance," says Gerard, but Michael and Gabriel are more interested in their own escapades with the dead. They go into the kitchen and find Clara, the maid still up, having put off the washing till the last minute.

"Why don't you go to bed?" Michael says, anxious to free the kitchen for conversation. She protests that she'd only have to do it in the morning, and he promises to do it for her.

"They are certainly back in the country," says Gabriel, when she has gone. "Michael tripped over a body! We were the first to find it." He speaks most smugly, and as if Michael had done something clever. "Strange how providence connects us, is it not?"

"You're sure it was a vampire's doing?" asks Gerard, who doesn't much feel like listening to Gabriel's breathless retelling of the epic story of pursuit he considers to be his life.

"Oh yes. A layman would almost certainly say he had had his throat cut, but the wound was particularly wide. The real sign is that the wound was a little gummy with blood, nothing more, and the body in general seemed drained." Gabriel disappears into the pantry to retrieve the milk, and sniffs at it suspiciously before deciding to use it.

"How do you know it was Victoria and Walter, and not another vampire?" asks Gerard.

"_William_," Gabriel corrects irritably.

"I said that," says Michael.

"I am sure it was they. I tell you, somehow I always come to know when they are about." Gabriel sips his cocoa, face serene. He is not long returned to England after undertaking an incidental Grand Tour of Europe, as these two vampires desperately tried to shake him off. They finally succeeded, and Gabriel returned home, maddened but sure William and Victoria would slink home when they thought it might be safe. They seem to have an attachment to England.

Michael assures Gerard that Gabriel is very frivolous in company, but he usually seems morose and brooding to Gerard. Now he seems positively to glow at the notion that he might catch these particular vampires, and drive the last vestiges of life in their bodies out with a stake. Gerard can remember when Gabriel hunted vampires in general, to save humans from their clutches. Then he became fixated on two especially vicious vampires and developed a peculiarly personal relationship with them from a distance. Gerard thinks of vampires, so nearly dead, hunting for life while Gabriel hunts them. As if Marigold would not drink blood and leave people dead, if it kept her in this world and not put out wherever she was now, where she seems to be getting on as well as if she'd been turned out into the snow in her nightgown. (Or rather her shroud, not that she had that with her either.)

"Don't you feel sorry for them?" asks Gerard. "Surely they're not actually evil. For instance, you could give all your money to poor people, but then you'd be poor. They could stop killing people, but then they'd be dead."

"It isn't as simple as that. They don't die very easily," says Michael, who helps Gabriel hunt vampires for want of something better to do, and to keep Gabriel company. The way their existence falls like dust through their fingers is the only thing that genuinely intrigues him about the business itself.

"The vampiric state is evil," says Gabriel. "It is a kindness to free them of it." He is nonchalant and uninterested in taking offence.

"But kindness has _mercy_," says Gerard. "It doesn't stick stakes through peoples' hearts for their own good."

"_Dead_ peoples' hearts," Gabriel reminds him.

Gerard can't really explain that he is suddenly suffused with charity and the spirit of amnesty for all dead people, and has a need to console that has no expression. Michael and Gabriel look so pleased with themselves, besides.

Gabriel soon leaves, and Michael goes to bed. Gerard feels stirred up and restless, unready for sleep. Deciding to investigate the attic, he takes a mousetrap and goes to see if it is rats or pigeons up there. The way up to the attic is in a cupboard, in which there are steep wooden stairs going almost straight up like a ladder. There is a very small landing at the top of these stairs, and the attic door. Gerard has already twisted the handle a little, prepared to struggle with it, when he hears voices from the other side. He thinks the phase "other side" to himself, briefly wonders why it brings with it a wash of uncomfortable thoughts, and hastily substitutes "from the attic".

"I'm thinking of something."

"Is it a place?"

"No."

"Is it something useful?"

"Not particularly."

"Is it something for fun?"

"Not particularly."

Gerard tugs about at the door as quietly as possible and steps a little way into the room.

"Can you wear it?"

"Maybe a _little_ bit of it."

The voices are coming from behind a wall of miscellany. Gerard tiptoes to the furthest extent of the wall, and discovers a large hollow between it and the window. There are two people lying down in it, one speaking languidly with blankets pulled up over its face. Gerard can see the other, a young man not facing his way. His mouth open in speech, Gerard sees the small glint of long, sharp canine teeth. The pallor of his face. The bloodstained bottles littering the floor.

"Are you Victoria and William?" Gerard asks stupidly.

The young man sits up and turns to face him; the other person pulls down the blankets and Gerard observes the beard.

"Mr. Smith and Mr. Ross!" says Gerard, perfectly astonished, because he recognises them; they are boarders who vanished a couple of years ago. They left without paying their bill, but it seems now that this was far from the most significant fact concerning their disappearance.

The two of them crouch in horror before squinting at him as he says their names. They look as though they are not so sure they know who he is.

"You're the landlord, aren't you?" Mr Smith says. Admittedly, Gerard had not been much of a prominent household figure the last time they were downstairs.

"You've become vampires!" Gerard exclaims. "But this is such a coincidence – my brother hunts them and here you are in the attic – and I was – I was thinking about dead people, and here I find you in the attic!"

The vampires gape at him a little. "Mr Way . . ." says Ross.

"Way hunts vampires?" says Smith.

"He helps a friend of his. Please don't attack me, I'm sure Gabriel will wreak vengeance for me," says Gerard, the notion of personal attack just dawning.

"We won't attack you," says Ross. "Look at these bottles. We drink blood from the butcher's. We don't do anything." He picks up a bottle and waves it, looking anxious.

"I will tell you what," says Smith, getting to his feet with great determination. "Now you've found us, we are going to go down in the kitchen and boil this blood up. We have to have it cold, so we never drink quite enough. We're always _cold_."

Gerard follows him down the stairs. Ross, close behind him, grips his coat and says, "You know William and Victoria." Gerard ploughs into Smith, who has stopped dead. Stalled on the stairs, he becomes conscious of the mousetrap in his hand, digging in to his palm where he's been gripping it. He takes advantage of the opportunity to lay it on the step.

"I know _of_ them," he says. "They're the ones my brother's friend wants to catch."

"Ah! You mean he might kill them?" asks Ross.

"He might," says Gerard. "Though they're his match, if you ask me."

"We hate them," says Ross. "We're terrified of them finding us and trying to make us be like _them_. They were the ones who made us vampires. We think they want to take us to live with them, as though they want to be our parents or something. But they're just . . . disgusting."

They troop soberly through the house to the kitchen. Smith pours the blood into a saucepan to boil and he and Ross stand around it with an air of excitement.

"We've never had it hot," Ross says. "It's sure to be a disappointment."

"It must be horrible sitting in the attic all day with only that dreadful blood to eat and drink."

"We have buns sometimes. We can eat when we're full of blood, otherwise we can't digest," says Smith. Without being invited they make for the pantry and bring back a cold pork pie.

Gerard finds two cups for them. He realises Michael had only got through half the washing up, and debates doing it himself.

"Yes," says Smith. "It is horrible. We get very bored."

"Well, you can't stay in the attic. This is obviously why I found you." They stare at him coldly and then glance at his hands warily as he pours their blood out into cups. Gerard hands them them their cups, and they sip tentatively. "How is it?" he asks.

"It makes it bearable, and that is a great thing," Ross says, gulping it down.

"Do you feel as if you have lost yourselves? Do you feel bitter against the living that they have a life and time to step out onto, that they can change, where they can be seen? Because that is what makes you feel dead, when you feel nothing you do goes further than yourself, that you have no power to take part in the world or make people see you." Gerard has discovered one of the things that upset him about Marigold; she reminded him of his worst fears regarding himself.

At this moment he is happy. He is thinking that there is a conjunction between him, Marigold, and these freezing, half-starved vampires. Gerard is the living, he must be the active agent at work on the other elements. To Gerard that makes it seem as if everything might be going to make sense. He reminds himself that he need not feel as if he has anything to do with Marigold, because tonight has been most generous in providing a sense of purpose and the proof that he can be of some help. Despite the shifts in his own stability he is certain that other people are all the better for him if only he can manage to bestow himself on them. (Trying to bestow is where so many of the problems start.) He demands as his native right to be the person who can remove the stubborn lid to the jar.

Ross and Smith look at each other. "We're fed up to the back teeth of sitting in that attic," says Ross.

"We're very stoic," says Smith. "We try not to think about things too much."

"That's the desolation of giving up. I know it exactly. When everything there is that you don't have might as well not exist. I've felt like I was sitting in a pond and I couldn't bring myself to get out of it, like when you're drunk and you fall down. And I've felt like I was living in the pond, and I got used to being wet, and having my fingers caught in slimy weed. I made friends with the toads and newts, and expected them to come and visit me. Like rats and prisoners."

"I'd have liked to live in a pond when I was a child," Smith says. "And we've become quite fond of our rats, except they're mice."

"It's a matter of principle," says Ross. "We can make friends with mice but not rats."

"It's very difficult to find the courage to really live, but it has to be done," says Gerard, feeling as if they are wandering off course.

"We're really dead, not metaphorically dead," Ross says warily.

"Who knows what death is?" cries Gerard. "Mayhap it is only a state of mind!" The "mayhap" makes him realise he is straying into his more esoterical séance-talk, and he flushes. "Be defiant! You are still in this world, you still have the power to take action and see its effect. Marigold would do _much_ if she was you." Succubus-like activities, most likely, he reflects.

"You sound like you want to send us down the Congo on a mission," says Ross.

"Oh," says Gerard, abruptly dropping the pomposity of responsibility, "I got you out of the attic, what more do you want?"

Now that they are out of the attic, Gerard ensconces them in a spare room (there are many). "I'll get you as much hot blood as you like tomorrow. If only I can boil it up without anybody noticing. Or will you be asleep? Are you nocturnal?"

"I don't know," says Smith. "We sleep a lot. The only thing is, direct sunlight hurts our eyes. I obtained tinted spectacles for us – could you fetch them from the attic?" Gerard does, and catches his foot in the mousetrap on the stair.

* *

Gerard wakes up to red beating through his eyelids. At first he thinks it is a ray of sunlight aimed at him, but when he opens his eyes the glow vanishes and he remembers Marigold. He gasps as he remembers the way she felt, reaching out even while mired in annihilation. Then he remembers the boarders, shoved over the cliff off life and huddled on a little shelf some way down, all indignation and despondency. Thinking about them, Gerard is filled with the urge to tear open their curtains and yell "Rise and shine!" If he did that, he had better have a breakfast tray with him, and he has an ingenious thought on how to prepare a vampire's breakfast disguised as a human's.

He rushes round to the butcher's and comes back with a jug of pig's blood and some fat. The boarders ought by now to be into the full swing of breakfast in the dining room but the meal is still at the kitchen stage, partly because of the washing up situation. Clara is almost at the point of a full-out yelling row with one of the lodgers, and when Gerard commandeers kitchen space with his jug, she and Cook turn on him, and Clara smashes the sugar basin in her exasperation.

She starts to rummage through the cupboard under the sink to see if they have another, but that is where all the black beetles live. Disturbed, they begin to swarm across the floor. Gerard and Clara scramble onto table and chair in disgust, but it is only when Mrs. Williams, the cook, starts stamping on them, vigorously grinding them into the floor, that they cannot contain their screams. Clara does what she can do assist with meal preparation from her vantage point, and makes flying leaps into the hallway when she needs to take something into the dining room.

Serving breakfast is one of the things Gerard ought to do, but which never occurs to him, not even to the extent of getting up in time for it. It is one of the things that explain the way the establishment fails to fulfil its purposes. Now that he is actually here, he is instead mixing up a black pudding for "some rum new boarders." Still standing on a chair, with a bowl of blood and fat, Gerard adds oats for a reason he will not later recall. Cook suspects nothing – it would be quite useless to ask her to prepare anything extra for breakfast. If Gerard wants to keep these boarders, and they want black pudding, he had certainly better make it himself.

It is not really such a good solution; Ross and Smith look quite horrified when faced with the pudding – Gerard does not after all yell "rise and shine!" at them.

"I don't think that's a proper pudding," Ross tells him. "I never did like blood pudding but I suppose it might have been alright. But that isn't a proper pudding. It would have been better to drink it cold."

He and Smith look very disappointed – they were looking forward to becoming accustomed to regularly served hot blood. Gerard pokes at the mess in the bowl with a spoon and lays it down on the chest of drawers with a sigh. "I suppose it defeated the object," he says.

There is a pause for decency, and Ross says, "Are you going to get us some more? You see, we would usually be asleep, and now we're not."

Gerard does visit the butcher's again ("I dropped it."), and the baker's too. It is a cross little outing, but while he is making it he decides that he will stuff Ross and Smith with more blood and food than they could think to ask for, and it had better bloody brighten them up.

When he gets back, Mrs Williams, Michael and Gabriel are all in the kitchen when he enters it, having hidden the jug of blood behind the curtain of the hall window while he went to look.

"Gabriel's coming to stay," says Michael.

"Why can't you go and stay with him?" asks Gerard. He can see that the servants in Gabriel's fine town house might find Michael odd company for their master to keep – Gerard doesn't even know how they became friends.

"I find it more cheerful here," Gabriel says, waving his hand in a light-hearted manner at the kitchen to prove it. Mrs Williams and Gerard gaze at him with impolite venom. Gerard is not certain whether the mood he feels rolling in on him is a period of blackness or brightness, and feels Gabriel will crash in on it with discordant effect either way.

"Oh dear, there's black beetles all over the floor," says Michael, just noticing.

"Gerard doesn't want me to come and stay," says Gabriel. "I don't know why, I'll pay rent. I'll try to put your black beetles away for you if you like. Do you think if I tried to put them back, all the beetles in the cupboard will run out?"

"I think all the beetles in the cupboard will run out," says Michael.

Gerard goes to sulk in his bedroom. He doesn't feel like going up to Smith and Ross without the blood, and he feel suddenly as if he is living in a halfway-house, surrounded by the wilds of No Man's Land. This isn't quite what the new-leaf Gerard was supposed to be like; living for the fuss of séances and now all this worrying about dead people and fussing about with jugs of blood and black beetles and _people_. The feeling accumulates through the next couple of weeks, though he does find a way to make it easier to prepare hot blood.

"Marigold's in the kitchen. She's unquiet and I have to be alone to wrestle with her. Out you go," announces Gerard several times a day. He doesn't do it when Michael is there, because he might want to know what Gerard is talking about, where nobody else should care whether or not they know. Or, well, nobody but Gabriel, who seems quite interested in who or what this Marigold might be, but Gerard ignores him. Actually, Gerard has to spend a rather bothersome amount of time ignoring Gabriel, because Gabriel takes to hovering around Gerard whenever Michael is not there – most likely gone to see Alicia from round the corner.

When Michael is there, he and Gabriel tend to sit about in various locations throughout the house, playing cards. To Gerard there seems something melancholy in the tableau they represent. They lean their faces against their elbows and sigh thoughtfully, and they seem cheerful enough, but somehow they also seem like they will always sit there, and always have been. They don't play for money – that would be difficult – but for words Gabriel cut out of a dictionary. It is actually Gerard's dictionary, bought when he was interested in poetry. Not that he became uninterested in poetry, but now he knows a great deal by heart and it seems like he has as much as he needs for the moment. Gabriel and Michael pronounce the words in low voices as they play - _beloved, drear, bright, dull, boon, damp, bloom, decay_ . . . There are two sets of words, and the more you have of one set, the richer you would be if there was money involved, while the more you have of the other, the poorer you would be.

Ross and Smith also appear to have little conversation beyond word games. Gerard goes and sits with them often, bringing regular supplies of blood and food. He talks to them about the pond often too, growing attached to the words he uses as if there is some kind of charm in them that will eat misfortune and unhappiness. They do look back at him with newly bright eyes when he talks. They play a lot of I-Spy, Smith and Ross sitting cross-legged on one bed, Gerard lying on his back on the other. All three of them are good at Spying things the others don't guess, but that means two out of three are always irritated. The vampires constantly get up to flit about the room and tap their fingers along the surfaces. The house feels as if it is whiling away its time.

Gerard is whiling away his until his next séance. He is anxious to get to it; he needs to know if anything (or anyone) is going to happen to him again. Gerard is horribly flinching at the idea that anything will occur, and can already feel the sick disappointment of trying hopefully to communicate and finding nothing. He plans to keep matters on as shallow a level as possible. It is just that he is so anxious to see if this will prevail, or if spirits will gather like a storm in the Sanders' drawing room, now they know there is a place for them there.

* *

So he goes to the Sanders' house, for the Sanderses are again playing host. All is much as it was the last times, and all the other times before that. Most of the people are the same. Gerard would have been taken aback if Walter Panderson had dared, or cared to attend, and it appears he has not. As if in his stead, there is a large, handsome woman in her middle years who Gerard has not seen before. She sits back from conversation and surveys Gerard with oppressive intensity. Gerard feels a durable look of mystic beatitude settle itself obstinately upon his face, as he trains his gaze at something hovering in the air between them.

When they get down to business, Gerard cries, "Are the spirits with us tonight?" loud enough to be heard over the Hallelujahs. He feels as if he were forcing his way into himself today, rather than out as he does sometimes. He seems to have his hand held out, as he always does when asking this question, to test whether something is wet or dry. Gerard cannot discern for a long while, but eventually he determines on wet. "They are with us," he says.

"Do the spirits mean well?" asks Mrs. Jessett. She isn't quite sure whether to address herself to the spirits or to Gerard, and her voice is hollow, while her intonation rises with garden party lightness.

There is a pause. "The child could not say, to be sure. You will just have to ponder whether you merit well or ill."

"Is my husband there?" asks Mrs. Jessett.

"Oh yes, dear old Robert is here. Couldn't keep him away, rain or shine. Bless faithful old Robert. He can't complain, doing marvellously, missing you and the girls, but he _would_ like to share his doubts regarding the gardener. He feels the man does more harm than good, and is liable to get worse."

Gerard does feel perfectly familiar with Robert, along with all the others who pop into his mouth between teeth and tongue at these moments. He hopes again that they are other people's phantoms and not his own. Apart from anything else, it would be such an absurdly mundane way to run mad. If the dead are truly restless, and capable of communication, Gerard would expect a riot, a revolution, squeaking and gibbering in the streets! But maybe death does not recreate souls as something rich and strange, and most of the dead like such stuff as much as the living. God only knows who the little girl is, but she seems to find them dull also. The séance-goers willingly run the gauntlet of her flippancy.

Everything is much as usual. Gerard is unwilling to bring the wolf into play. He always thinks of him as delving deeper, for all that he usually rambles with little sense, only a general effect of eeriness.

"Is there anyone here who wishes to communicate with _me_?" asks the strange woman. Gerard is sure she has come to chase up Marigold. He feels angry and alarmed at this stirring of the mud at the bottom of the pool. His alarm jumps into something else when there is a heavy thud from ahead. The company is obviously made of milk and water, and, already half expecting Marigold to descend upon them somehow, they scream their heads off. This is when the chandelier above Gerard's head parts company with the ceiling.

* *

A few minutes later Gerard's eyes flutter open a little. He sees a few people clutching at the doorframe and calling anxiously into the room. The frightening woman tells them with the voice of authority to "go into the other room and calm down."

"Is anyone dead?" murmurs Gerard. The dark figure above him leans down.

"Look into my eyes," says Mr. Sanders. "Think only of my eyes and leave behind all disturbing experiences."

Gerard does look into his eyes, because there is nowhere else to look.

"Do make him stop," says Mrs. Sanders with great irritation. "He has no mesmeric skill, none at all."

Then the room is emptier, and on further inspection Gerard sees that it is empty of anyone except him and that woman. He realises that he is still in his chair, only his chair is on the floor. Gerard feebly waves his legs, which are already in the air, and, after considering, rolls sideways to free himself.

"I am Walter Panderson's aunt," the woman says. "My name is Mrs. Urie."

Bobbing up from his crouch, Gerard catches sight of himself in a mirror, and, as he sinks onto a sofa, he keeps on looking. His face is deathly pale and he has cut his temple, besides the back of his head being badly bruised. One side of his face is streaked with blood like ritual markings, the other side is bright and wet with it, his hair smeared into it. Gerard thinks about Snow White. Her mother was right; there is something pretty about the colours together.

"You are purveying a lot of nonsense," says Mrs. Urie. "You may be malevolent or simply misguided, I don't know. But I would like to know how you justify such mischief as this meddling in private lives. My nephew was most unsettled by your allegations."

"I don't mean to make any _allegations_," says Gerard. He gazes on the chandelier, resting in the nest created by the overturned table, wrought curlicues surrounded by a welter of smashed glass. "I _didn't_ make any allegations. Did something just happen?"

"A servant dropped something upstairs. I daresay that was why the chandelier came down. You besmirched a dead girl's reputation, and disturbed my nephew's peace of mind," says Mrs. Urie, severely explanatory as yet, rather than simply severe.

"It was the dead girl's decision, not mine. I won't stifle the dead if they are unquiet. It's not my job to tell them to sit down and shut up if they start rabble-rousing." Gerard is thinking that this is going to be bad, if Mrs. Urie wants it to be. If the people in these houses turn against him, that is it, and what will he do then? His enterprise depends entirely on their co-operation.  
Mrs Urie pauses and sits down before she speaks. "The dead do not do anything. They will not speak to you; that is not how it is. People need to learn that and stop battling against the ways of God."

"But when they leave things undone—"

"Then they will remain undone. They don't matter anymore."

Gerard seems to see into a well of death deeper than any he's looked into before.

"Things will always matter, as long as people still have their souls."

She narrows her eyes. "You are argumentative with me, and these – séances – are argumentative with the Lord and the way he laid out the world. Spiritualism is unholy, unhealthy, and you have used it to wreak great harm. I don't know what your motives are –"

"They are entirely pure," Gerard cuts in."

"—But you have no right to tell my nephew these immoral things."

"You can't seal my mouth. I didn't say anything immoral. Marigold needed to speak to Walter."

"The dead don't speak. This is a shameless mockery of the dead and the living."

"You've probably got the wrong impression from all that panic. These occasions are usually perfectly calm, and as serious and respectful as you could wish," says Gerard, taking a little license here. "Marigold is the most startling thing that's ever occurred." And is, moreover, a connection of this woman, so it seems a little galling that she is the one turning up to complain about her behaviour.

They go on aimlessly for some time before they lose all reserve and end up hissing back and forth like a Punch and Judy show.

"You may have power over your nephew, but you have none over me," says Gerard, who doesn't really even know what this woman wants.

"I think you are a madman, Mr. Way," she says, and leaves the room.

  


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**In the Midst of Life 1/5**   
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	2. Chapter 2

  
  
  
  
  


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[Part One](http://cleodoxa.livejournal.com/3038.html#cutid1)

Afterwards Gerard feels nervous, defiant and somehow guilty. He decides that the next séance is going to have unruly spirits. Unruly spirits don't do polite enquiries or constructive communication, even so far as Marigold did. What is more, Gerard is not the only one who can summon nuisances. When the mood is right, he need only choose a person, most likely place a pen in their hand, and off they go. The presences are loud, sometimes obscene, and always unsavoury. They speak of the blackness between the worlds in a way that fills no one with hope, yet with a certain energetic urgency that leaves them braced. Gerard hopes it will take the attention off him and relieve everyone's nerves.

On this occasion, Walter is here. He has come on the wrong day, really. He seems to have screwed himself up to coming here, and expects more Marigold for his trouble. He sits disapprovingly in the midst of what he does get. They learn _"we all go to hell its really quite pleasant except for the smell"_, and Gerard leans towards Walter and makes some pleasantry about the hounds of hell in connection with his aunt. He won't remember what it was afterwards, and Walter doesn't look like he pays it much mind.

"Do you think it is allowable to ignore the dead?" he asks Gerard.

"It's quite allowable not to attend any more séances," says Gerard, though perhaps he ought to think of self-interest, and tell him it isn't. "I don't suppose she'll reach you if you stay away from them. The dead have no dominion over the living. It's unkind, but if nature deals you a superior hand I don't suppose you gain anything but loss if you don't play it." Everyone jumps as a cigar case falls off the mantelshelf.

* *

Whatever Mrs. Urie hears of the hell-hound remark – Gerard wishes he could remember if he compared her to one, facetiously threatened to send them after her, or what – it is clear she takes exception to it. She suddenly appears in the kitchen at the most inopportune of moments. Mrs. Williams and Clara are both out, and Gerard is standing with Mr. Smith and Mr. Ross. They are breathless and their faces are screwed up in the moment before a copious amount of speech. There are bottles of blood on the table, just laid down.

"Mr. Way!" comes a voice from the doorway. Gerard turns to see Mrs. Urie standing there. Then he involuntarily turns his back to her for a moment at all the scuffling behind him as Ross and Smith try to shove the bottles up their sleeves and herd themselves behind his back. Ross begins to remove his tinted spectacles, and a bottle falls out of his sleeve and smashes. Gerard steps into the pool of blood, his shoes nearly covering the stain.

"I have heard further of your wickedness and impertinence," says Mrs Urie, who is uninterested in this activity. Behind her is a dark young man Gerard takes for her son. "And I warn you that I shall not tolerate its continuance."

"I never meant any harm," Gerard says.

"You mock the dead, and you mock the bereaved."

"You are simply an unbeliever. I do no such thing." Gerard bores his eyes into her face and speaks haughtily, but he knows this is the end.

"It is you who are the unbeliever, and I promise you ruination," says Mrs Urie, and sweeps out. Her son, leaning in the doorway, looks surprised to be leaving so soon as he swings away from the frame and follows her. Gerard stares after them, mouth open. He knows he ought to find words now, and run after her with them, make her change her mind. He racks and rummages his brain, and they are here somewhere but he can't _find_ them . . . The front door slams.

Mr Smith pushes at Gerard to get him out of the way, so he can mop up the blood. Gerard sent them out in daylight to get their own blood and they have come back in great agitation. Before the cause of the agitation can be discovered, there is a knock at the front door.

Gerard finds the young man standing there, looking apologetic. "Did my mother leave her gloves here?" he asks. They look around them in the hall and go back to the kitchen, where they find one glove. The son casts a slightly surprised look at Ross and Smith as they back themselves up against the sink.

"Do remember to thank your mother for ruining my life," says Gerard as he pretends to look for the other glove, which plainly isn't here. Mr Urie looks rather irritated, an expression that intensifies when Gerard suddenly grips his arm on hearing Gabriel and Michael's voices in the hall. Mr Smith and Mr Ross start and bumble around the table. As the voices come closer, Gerard charges towards them, nearly knocking the table over, and bundles them into the cupboard under the backstairs. Then he turns to find Mr Urie to make some kind of apology for this odd behaviour, and realises that he has bundled him, too.

"We have just seen two vampires!" Gabriel cries, throwing open the kitchen door.

"And they weren't Victoria and William," says Michael.

"We were across the road from a butcher's shop when I glanced over, and there were two pale young men leaving the shop. They wore tinted spectacles and clutched bottles that looked to _me_ as if they contained blood. We tried to cross the road, to follow them to their lair, but there were too many carriages. And then, of a sudden, the vampires took off running, and we did not even see which street they took."

"Maybe it was a leap to be so sure they were vampires," Gerard says. Everything always had to go wrong at the same time, didn't it?

"One or two of those details isolated, and I'd see ordinary young men. All of those details together, and I know it is vampires I have before me," says Gabriel.

"You can't be _sure_, and it's sad that you would want to pursue them when they must be trying to improve themselves anyway – vampires in the butcher's shop," Gerard says.

"That is a bit odd," Michael says.

"I don't know what that might be about, but you may rest assured that these corpse-people have no finer impulses." Gabriel puzzles for a moment. "Perhaps they are cowards," he concludes cheerfully.

"I would make a _very_ cowardly vampire," says Michael.

Gabriel looks as if he's considering disagreeing here, but the weight of dishonesty proves too heavy to bear.

"I'm sure you'd be a great success, Gabriel," says Gerard.

"Well, naturally. Gamekeepers and poachers, they know all there is to know about each other."

Gerard is too exasperated and cross with life even to bother trying shoving Michael and Gabriel off somewhere else. He doesn't embark on some plea for clemency in the abstract, either. He watches as the door finally swings closed behind them, and holds open the cupboard door to let out whatever mess he has created in there.

Gerard peers into the cupboard; it takes him a moment to discern tucked in-bodies mostly concealed behind the mops and discarded coats and chairs. Mr Urie is sitting cross-legged, gazing intently at the door, which becomes Gerard's face. Gerard grasps hold of his shoulder and pulls him up in his haste to get him out of the cupboard and then out of the house with the minimum of fuss and consequences. "I'm so sorry, Mr Urie," he says, apologising for the cupboard, the vampires and the manhandling. "You are Mr Urie, yes?" Mr Urie nodds his head distractedly – marvellous, so this really is going to get back to Mrs Urie – and thuds down onto a chair. Ross and Smith crouched uncomfortably, heads bowed down, begin to unfold themselves.

"My arms are all gooseflesh," Urie exclaims, pulling up his sleeves.

Mr Ross and Mr Smith scramble up, and Smith puts a saucepan on the stove.

Mr Urie says, "I take it you two – gentlemen are the two young men by the butcher's shop?" He's looking at Ross's dark spectacles. He looks about him with an expression both absorbed, as if concentrating on putting the picture together, and indignantly repulsed.

"You don't _need_ to know anything about what's happening," says Mr Ross. "It isn't happening to you." He takes off his glasses, perhaps so Urie can better see his go-away expression.

"It was us, yes," says Smith. "But you don't need to worry about us. We're just harmless natural phenomena. We don't drink people's blood, or kill them."

"Really, they don't. They're really perfectly nice, ordinary people," says Gerard.

"We're just two clerks that were attacked," says Smith. "We have no sinister history at all."

"And it's alright that I know?" says Mr Urie. "You're not going to change any of that because of pragmatism and suchlike?" They all stare at eachother even more nervously.

"Are you going to do anything very dreadful when you leave?" asks Mr Ross, his tone trying to promise further menaces if the wrong answer is forthcoming.

"I don't think I'll need to mention it to anyone. May I just say, though, are you sure this isn't some kind of mistake you've made and convinced each other of – those other men too?"

"Of course we're sure, you ignorant little fool. Technically, I'm dead as a doornail! I was there when it happened, and I assure you, it was hard to _mistake_," says Mr Smith.

"Are you dead, too?" Mr Urie asks Mr Ross, who nods. He sighs unhappily and looks as if he is trying to believe. "So, by stumbling in here I have turned over a stone and found a new dark and bloody side to life? Right at this moment, I have to tell you I am furious with my mother and her gloves, because I don't want to believe these dreadful things are part of life. Mr Way! If revenants are real, then I suppose you aren't a fraud?"

"Vampire is the modern word," says Ross.

"And I'm not a fraud," Gerard says. "I am completely sincere, both as a professional and as a person. If people don't want to talk to the dead, if you ask me they shouldn't come to séances. There's nothing shady or seedy about me even if this _is_ a horrid kitchen."

Mr Urie looks worried. "I knew Marigold . . . She was the dearest friend of my cousin, Walter's sister. So now you're telling me there are all _sorts_ of strange things in the world!"

"That's right, Horatio," Mr Ross says.

The last thing Gerard wants to talk about is the live Marigold.

"I feel so hunted," Mr Smith says, losing interest in the Mr Urie aspect of the situation. "We did not even know those two had seen us. We were agitated because we saw William and Victoria in a carriage. William turned his head and I'm sure he saw us. That was why we ran."

"I couldn't have chosen a worse day for your little trip, could I?" says Gerard.

"So what is all this with these two men just now? They didn't seem kindly disposed towards you. Do they not understand that you don't kill people? What would happen if they found you?" asks Mr Urie.

"They don't understand, no," says Gerard. "One of them's my brother, so he's not really a problem. It's his friend who hunts vampires as a kind of calling, and kills them. It's obviously very inconvenient that he should happen to be a friend of Michael's."

"And this Victoria and William. Are they hunting vampires, too?" asks Mr Urie.

"Good Lord, no," says Mr Smith. "They're vampires. They are the real, bloody, nightmarish kind of vampire, and they Turned me and Ryan. They have a strange, maudlin affection for us, and we're always afraid that they'll capture us, or kill us in rage at being rejected. Well, by always I mean we met them once after being Turned and we've been hiding since to avoid it happening again. Among other things."

"They knew we boarded here," says Mr Ross. "Now that they know we're still somewhere about, they'll certainly come to the house. Suddenly everyone we've got reason to fear knows we're in the area and it's so easy for all of them to narrow it down to here."

Gerard feels frightened for the first time. He pictures himself dead on the floor, predatory booted feet stepping over him. He feels his own wide eyes meet Urie's.

"They might come while _I_ am here?" Mr Urie says.

"Perhaps we should batten down the hatches. We are a castle besieged, no one can enter or leave. We could make a barricade behind the front door! We're severely lacking in cannons and molten lead, though," Gerard says, picturing a far superior scene.

"There's lots of bricks and rubble in the . . . garden, yard," says Mr Smith. "We could gather them up and hang out of an upstairs window, ready for them."

"_slingshots_," says Gerard. "I'm not sure how they work."

"No."

"The good thing is, if Victoria and William come to the house, Saporta would probably be there and he might slay them. Only after that, he'd probably slay us," Ross says.

"There's the rub, yes," Gerard agrees. "I hope Gabriel doesn't think to ask at the butcher's. He's bound to find out about me if he does."

Smith remembers the blood, and jumps up to take it off the stove. Mr Urie watches with some horror, and something resembling pity.

"I feel dreadful, turning up just as you all seem to be plunging into mortal peril," he says.

"Do you think, if William and Victoria did get in here, and Saporta killed them, and then realising we were here came after us, Spencer and I could attack him? With our fangs? We have got some supernatural strength." Ross's voice is filled with wistful, unconvinced argument.

"If it comes to that, I think I will have to just try and protect you. I do have some cachet with Gabriel, because of Mikey. To be honest, when I think of you attacking, it seems like you would be pretending to be-"

"- dogs, I know. I don't think I could actually go for someone's throat without feeling so foolish," Ross says.

Urie says, "But you're really just two ordinary young clerks? And you've become these strange creatures, as well? But it seems so dreadful that you are infected with this disease. I mean, you aren't monsters, are you, you're simply ill."

"That's right," Mr Smith says. "We aren't monsters."

"If only I took a house of my own," Mr Urie says. "I'd take you all to stay with me until all your pursuers lost confidence in the trail."

Smith and Ross both look astonished. "That is a shame," Gerard says. "It would have been fun trooping off to some fancy place for our own safety."

"I think I'll leave now, in case something happens, but may I come back tomorrow and see if you are alright?"

"Oh yes," says Gerard. "Oh! What about your mother? Will you tell her? Whatever will she think?"

"Of course I won't tell her, as if she'd believe me," Urie says, looking impatient. "She would think you'd fed me some nonsense to make your supernatural stuff sound credible." He pauses, eyes narrowed. "I haven't completely lost my head and instinct in hearing the ring of truth in all this, have I?"

Mr Ross raises his glass of blood to him, and takes a long drink, eyes on him.

Mr Urie draws a deep breath. "Alright. I really think I will be by to see you tomorrow, then."

When Mr Urie is gone, Smith and Ross are smuggled up the backstairs.

"We aren't in any danger of being killed before _tomorrow_, are we?" asks Mr Ross, sitting down on his bed. "William and Victoria probably won't kill us if they find us, anyway. Do you think they might kill us?"

"Well, I feel got at, I'll tell you that much," says Gerard. "I would be much happier if we _could_ have a castle siege."

* *

The next day Gerard sits on the stairs all morning. When there is a knock at the door he starts up. "Wolves," he thinks. "Wolf," he thinks as he opens it, and finds a young woman, dark-haired and pretty, wearing tinted spectacles. Just as he opens the door, she is pulling something over her head. She whips it behind her back before he can see anything more than a flash of white.

"I'm sorry to trouble you," she says, "But I would like to know if there are two young men staying here-"

Gerard lies limp in the jaws of fear as he watches her mouth describing Smith and Ross. She doesn't move her lips much. Gerard thinks about Gabriel, but today, he isn't actually in. And she is a _woman_, and he can't really feel ready to see her impaled, going from bodily intact to not, right in front of him.

"I think I might remember these gentlemen from a year or two back. They did a runner, if I recall, and I am afraid I never saw them since," Gerard says, his gaze still fixed on her mouth. _You're a wolf, a wolf._

She says something else, looking a little distressed – smiles sweetly, and is halfway down the path before he knows it.

* *

Mr Urie does indeed visit later that day, and is smuggled upstairs to be assured that they have all survived thus far.

* *

They survive in the days that follow, too, though Messrs Urie, Ross and Smith continue doubtful. Gerard has other things to occupy him; Mrs Urie has got at all his séance regulars. He fantasises about not retrieving his deluge of correspondence from the post-office, but he goes in to get it every day anyway.

One married couple discover his home address and come, not so much to abuse him, as to lecture him about God.

"Quacks, mountebanks and charlatans, all those rotten with hypocrisy, they know not why their spirit-flesh prickles and chills with cold. It is because they dwell on the shadow-side of the world. Follow God and you will enter into His light," the woman says sternly.

Gerard grows tired of attempts at argument and self-justification, but they won't leave. He leaves them, walking from the room, but they follow him, upstairs and downstairs, room to room. Gerard is now too agitated to make a convincing assay at "Being Saved." Michael joins the trail and asks them to leave. That is no good. It seems impossible to use physical force on people talking of godliness, and their dead daughter besides, so in the end Gerard marches out into the street. He manages to run off down an alley and lose them.

The odd thing is that it is only that couple whose faith in Gerard has turned. The others are still convinced of his genuineness, only apparently séances are not allowed now Mrs Urie says so. They are wicked, heathen and unnatural, and everything of them resides in Mr Way's overheated, scrounging imagination, except when people who need to learn better conspire with him and pollute their own minds. Gerard gathers she does not say this once and have done with it, but continually threatens and harasses.

"If it is wrong to look into that other land, then why does dear Robert allow me to do it?" asks Mrs Jessett in a circuitous, tortuous letter. "I feel now I do not dare anything that perjures his soul."

Gerard is taken aback by quite how religious, how pious the group is turning out to be. Or at least, those who aren't simply delicate flowers frightened of Mrs Urie. So that is over. No more mediumship. He wouldn't know how to start again and gather a new set of people. In any event, Mrs Urie descends on him again and warns him against trying. She is everywhere, or thinks she is. She will hear of any Mr Ways at once, she says, and this impertinent conniving will again be quashed.

"I think you are taking the matter too personally," Gerard says. Marigold must have been a sensitive subject before he ever came along, if his intervention caused such a stir. Walter was engaged, apparently, and is no longer.

The conversation is conducted through the front door. Gerard has convinced everybody not to open the door before ascertaining who is behind it. Everybody complies unthinkingly, not wanting a return of the married couple. Gerard, of course, is thinking more of keeping out vampires.

Mrs Urie and Gerard give up on the other caving and admitting all their mistakes at much the same moment. Gerard can hear her clatter down the path as he clatters up the stairs. He hopes she hears him clatter.

Gerard does not know what happens now. He is still new-leaf Gerard but no longer has what has been the newest thing about new-leaf Gerard. He is disappointed in Mr Urie. He is apologetic, to a certain extent, but it doesn't occur to him to use influence with his mother. He has little to do with his days it appears, since he spends much of them in this dingy house, in a room with Ross and Smith. He is willing to play I-Spy, but more often he simply engages them in inane chatter.

Michael and Gabriel are asleep all day now, because at night they prowl the streets. Dead prostitutes are the vampire's calling card, and they have been left. Gabriel is gleeful in a way, to be engaged in pursuit, but also fierce and frustrated at the lack of vampiric run-ins. His and Michael's conversation is redolent of dead prostitutes. They are not cheerful company for Gerard.

* *

Then Gabriel receives a letter. "Damn it," he says. "The cook has run the nurse through."

"With a sword?" Gerard asks in surprise. "Slain her, you mean?"

"It is not yet mortal," Gabriel says. "I think I shall have to go home for a time. The governess seems somewhat harassed by the situation, and the vicar is writing me a letter to tell me I ought to put things in order. I suppose the cook shall have to be got rid of if she is running amok like this. People might not like to approach her."

"Oh," says Michael. He is silent for a moment, then brightens a little. "What if we come with you? Gerard, wouldn't you like to stay in the country for a while?"

"What?" says Gerard, who was just going to ask why Gabriel has a governess. "Oh, you want to brighten me up a bit. I don't know." He does rather like the idea, getting away from all these letters and the threat of people descending with tears. There might be green, and peace, as well as homicidal cooks. Though then there is the question of who is to feed the vampires while he is away. Surely they could come to some arrangement with Mr Urie.

"I'll think about it," Gerard says, and drifts away upstairs.

"Gabriel's going to the country to deal with something. I'm thinking I might go there for a bit with him and Michael. Do you think that would be alright?"

Ross and Smith look alarmed. "Why is Gabriel going away?" asks Ross. "William and Victoria are being _bad_ at the moment."

"Well, he'll probably be back soon," says Gerard.

"Can't we come with you?" asks Ross.

"Yes!" says Mr Smith. "We could follow you and find somewhere to stay. I'm sure we would be wise to leave London, and we should feel much safer leaving on Gabriel's coat-tails."

"Gabriel's a threat too," Gerard says.

"Yes, but in the country there would only be one. As it is, there's three," Smith says.

"But you do look a little bit vampiric. If you try to find somewhere to stay by yourselves, it's likely to get back to Gabriel, and he'll know at once."

Smith says, "I'm sure Brendon would not mind coming down with us. He could sort out that sort of thing."

"- Oh, Mr Urie. I suppose he might. Maybe it would be a good idea – I don't know though, could it really be a good idea to go and live on Gabriel's doorstep?"

"He doesn't seem to be there very often."

"I don't want to stay in London all by ourselves," says Ross, in a dismal kind of voice.

Urie comes by later, as he does every day. He is revealed to be quite willing to undertake a trip to the country.

"A change of scene will be marvellous," he says.

Gerard goes to tell Gabriel and Michael that yes, they will all be going to Ratfield Park together. Gabriel is new money; the Park is not ancestral, and there is no reason why he should not change its name. However, he seems unable to think of something that is not an ominous species of animal. "Panther Park", and "Cobra Park" seeming some reflection of his almost self-mocking but not quite, extravagantly grandiose view of himself.

"Have we got a time-table?" Gerard asks. "What time train do you think we could get?"

"Oh, we shan't get a train," Gabriel says. "They crash. Frequently. We shall simply go by carriage."

"But aren't we in a bit of a hurry?" says Gerard. He has only been on a train twice and had been convinced it was about to crash himself. He is strangely drawn to the thought of venturing on a train again, and is both relieved and disappointed to be relieved.

"Better the nurse is dead before we get there than we die on our way to console her for her sacrifice in my service," says Gabriel.

He and Michael disappear off to Gabriel's house to pack up his things. Gerard rushes upstairs to tell Mr Urie to go and pack his bags. He leaves the vampires in some dismay while he goes to pack his and Michael's things, because Mr Urie apparently does not have a carriage at his own disposal.

"What, your mother won't let you?" asks Gerard.

"She's always trying to _make_ me have one!" Mr Urie says. "It's just that I usually walk or travel with other people in theirs. So we shall have to get the stage coach."

"It can't possibly be a good idea to sit for hours with a lot of people with nothing better to do than stare at you for hours one end," says Mr Ross.

"You really don't look that sickly," Urie assures him. "You will have to keep your mouths shut, but I am sure it will be fine."

Gabriel keeps sending an errand-boy to keep Gerard informed of the very slow progress he and Michael are making with the packing. No servant is allowed to decide which clothes Gabriel should take or leave, and then he can't go anywhere without his notes. These were neatly classified, so Gabriel should have known exactly what he wanted to take with him. But then Michael dropped everything on the floor.

Gerard and the others wait impatiently. When Gabriel and Michael finally return it is nearly dark and no, they are not setting off until tomorrow. Mr Urie stays the night, having already told his family he is going away. He is loudly vocal in his irritation, and Gerard thinks it is a mercy he isn't trying to conceal him in a back bedroom on a more regular basis.

* *

Sometime in the evening, Gerard takes up mugs of hot blood, on a tray with a cloth thrown over it. He rounds a corner and crashes straight into Michael. Gerard does his best to keep the tray level, but as he winces away he sees that Michael has been distinctly splattered with blood. Michael stares at him and lifts the cloth on the tray.

"I'm feeding some vampires, alright?" Gerard hisses at him, unable to take the suspense.

"But _why_?"

"They used to lodge here. They're perfectly nice people, and they've never harmed or attacked anybody." Gerard pauses.

"Are you _sure_ you're safe?"

"Oh yes, quite alright."

"I don't think I want to know too much," Michael says after a pause. "I don't want to feel like I'm being too deceitful with Gabriel."

"Oh. Well they are just down here, are you sure you don't want to come and see them?"

"No, no."

"You're sure? Oh, and they're following us to Ratfield Park. They're going to find somewhere to hover locally – they're frightened of William and Victoria, you see. They won't leave them alone, apparently, it was them that Turned them. They – Mr Smith and Mr Ross – feel safer when they know Gabriel's about."

"Ross and Smith, good grief – I _said_ I didn't want to know too much-"

"So if anyone says anything funny-"

"Yes, I'll try and keep him away from finding out anything about them. He's very watchful though, you know; this is a pretty stupid idea," says Michael, becoming impatient as well as flustered.

"Well they've got a proper human person with them as well, so hopefully no one will notice anything."

"Alright, I'm going now," says Michael, and hurries off down the corridor.

* *

Now they are on their way, and Gabriel's carriage has stopped at an inn for a change of horses. Gerard is sitting alone in the carriage when he hears voices yelling. "Stop! Now is your time! Now, and you cannot defeat me!" shouts a voice Gerard only identifies as Gabriel's when he cranes round out of the window and sees Gabriel trying to climb into a carriage. Gabriel is frenziedly patting up and down himself at the same time, searching for a weapon. Michael keeps making little runs towards their own carriage, because obviously Gabriel has packed all his weapons and left himself none for daily wear. He never actually arrives at the carriage because he keeps darting back to stand in front of the other carriage's horses, instead. Gerard himself keeps half climbing out of the carriage, then turning back to rummage through some of their luggage, though everything he can find appears to be his, and he has neglected to pack that big knife he's been keeping under his pillow for a few weeks now.

He opens the door again as the horses start forward, and Michael does not get out of their path immediately but scoots backwards in front of them for a few moments. Then he and Gabriel make to run after the carriage before dashing back to Gerard. The door is torn open and Michael and Gabriel appear, buzzing at him.

"Was that-" starts Gerard.

"Victoria and William! Just drove off! You'll have to get out; we're not going to Ratfield anymore, they took the wrong road," Gabriel says, pulling at Gerard's shoulder.

"Will you be alright by yourself?" asks Michael, as Gabriel tosses out Gerard's luggage.

"Just make sure the servants are alright, you have my authority to do anything really necessary," Gabriel tells Gerard. "I'm sure the Bickways and Miss Ballato will manage things fairly well."

"Ye-e-s," Gerard answers Michael. He is not enchanted by this turn of events, but as the cogs turn, he thinks that perhaps it makes things easier on the vampire front.

The next minute Michael is hanging out of the carriage yelling "Goodbye!" as the horses make a smart pace down the road.

Gerard sits on a wall and waits almost an hour before the stagecoach comes along. Urie, Ross and Smith turn astonished faces towards him as he climbs in and wedges himself between Ross and a fat old man.

"Victoria and William were following us," Gerard says. "But now Gabriel and Michael have just driven off after Victoria and William, so that's both lots out of your way for a time. If you look on the bright side. The upsetting thing is, why were they following us?"

Smith and Ross try not to look at the old man, who is peering round at them in irritation at them leaning together conspiratorially to keep Gerard's hushed gabble to themselves. Their brows furrow.

"Well, you know Saporta and the history of this strange fascination with William and Victoria. Do you think it may be requited? Perhaps they are just unable to let people alone," says Mr Smith.

"On the other hand, perhaps they've combined their main preoccupations, perhaps found out Saporta was staying at the boarding house we came from, and convinced themselves he was holding us. Killed us, or sheltering us out of spite or in preparation for some great plan. Perhaps they believed we were in Saporta's carriage," Mr Ross says.

"I find that quite convincing, unfortunately," says Gerard. "What a narrow escape we've had!"

"So what's likely to happen next?" asks Mr Urie. "I don't suppose they are going to strike up conversation, are they? I presume either Saporta will catch up with them and finally kill them, or he'll lose them. In which case, they'll probably be content to stay lost for a while, or if they don't, hopefully they will find out that you two are not with him and not realise there's more to it."

"Or you could just say anything might happen. For instance, William and Victoria could kill Gabriel. In which case I hope Michael runs away very fast. I think it's better if for now we-"

"Put it out of our minds and try not to worry about things we can't do anything about," says Mr Urie.

"Yes. Perhaps you could come to the house with me!" says Gerard. "If Gabriel isn't there . . . I think I'll feel a little strange staying there on my own."

"Well, it is called Ratfield," Urie says. "The rats shall hide in the lair of the rat-catcher. I'll be a rat too!" he exclaims, as Ross and Smith look put out.

* *

They are abandoned by the stagecoach just outside the grounds of Ratfield Park. They all stand around their heap of luggage and look at it. "Couldn't we leave it, and send a servant to fetch it later?" asks Ryan.

Mr Way seems timorous about that, though. "It does seem like cheek now we are here," Brendon agrees. "I feel like Beauty's father in the house of the Beast. Something nasty will happen if we are rash."

With an ill will Ryan grasps hold of several handles at once, and lunges forward to make a start. He drops a trunk, and Way lets out a cry as a crystal ball rolls out onto the grass.

"It isn't hurt," says Ryan as Way kneels down to restore it to its place. Brendon assumes that exasperated but not unkind expression of it's-for-your-own-good that he always does assume when the subject of Way's séances come up.

"I haven't brought it along because I'm going to _gaze_," Mr Way says, peering up at Brendon. "I just _like_ it."

It is a nice object; it looks heavy, and its coloured, prism-ed insides look quiet and far away.

Brendon makes a swoop under a tree, and waves a stout stick at them. He hangs the trunk on it to demonstrate, and looks cheerful as they crowd round and load most of the rest of their luggage onto it. They stand back in satisfaction when they find they can indeed fit it on with no sign of the stick splitting. He looks less cheerful when they set off ahead of him, and he is still holding the stick. Ryan looks back at him left standing still behind them, and laughs. Brendon sets his mouth and shoulders with an exaggerated motion as Brendon sets his mouth and shoulders and shuffles along to catch them up.

"It looks quite a nice house," says Ryan as it comes into view, grand enough, and large, but unmenacing.

"Not too beastly, no," Way agrees.

Then they are climbing steps, and Spencer pulls the bell-rope. After a minute or two, a butler opens the door and they all herd past him, smiling politely, but in silence. Brendon catches his stick on the butler's shoulder, and all the baggage clatters down onto their feet. They start to put it back on the stick, then stop and arrange it in a neat pile instead.

"I'm a friend of Gabriel's," Gerard says at last, as they stand around. "I'm supposed to see if everything is alright and all that."

"I see, sir," says the butler, and without another word he leads them into a large, resplendent reception room. Ryan can't see why, as there is no one in the house to receive them, but he enjoys himself well enough peering around him. The rich swathes of fabric makes him think of stage sets.

After a few minutes, they hear a woman's voice outside. "Has nurse come back for something?" She sounds both hopeful and dreading. There is some muttering from the butler, and a young woman appears. She is pretty, but her garb is governess-like. Two children follow her, slipping through the heavy door as it shuts behind her, so it is to be supposed that she is a governess.

The woman looks around them with a puzzled, surveying air. One of the children is dark, the other reddish fair. The little dark-haired boy beetles over to the couch on which Ryan sits, thuds down, and looks back at his governess, eyebrows raised.

"I am Peter," he says. "And who are you?"

"Mr Ross," says Ryan.

"So you're the governess – is your name Miss Ballato?" asks Way.

"Miss Ballato, yes."

"I've come to see how you're all getting on, because Gabriel can't come, and after that I'm just going to stay for a while. Gabriel – did say I could." When he has finished, Way coughs, out of nervousness and the desire to pass the time.

A swift look of comprehension passes over Miss Ballato's countenance, replacing its somewhat ostentatious look of struggling for comprehension.

"Oh no, I'm not consumptive," Way says, sounding almost affronted. "And my hair makes me look paler than I am. It is actually brown; I dye it. Sometimes a . . . sepulchral appearance is an aid to me."

Way glances at the other three and is just indicating them with a hand when Brendon leans forward. "We are just hangers-on. You don't need to worry at all about us."

Miss Ballato and the children look at him with mild surprise and suspicion and swivel back to Way, as being the only one with a declared justification for being here.

"Well," says Miss Ballato. "I suppose the situation with Nurse and Cook is resolved now. Nurse has recovered, and has left us. It seems a little odd that it is Cook we have left to us, when we were preparing to dismiss her on Nurse's recovery . . . But I don't believe she presents an immediate danger." She pauses. "We shall have tea," she announces, and rings the servant's bell.

Way looks a little drawn up short to be told that everything is in hand.

"Cook still needs smoothing down, of course. She is most agitated about the whole affair," says Miss Ballato.

"How did they come to have a sword fight?" asks Brendon.

"Well," says Peter. "They had been enemies for a long time. It wasn't a particular quarrel that made them enemies, they just hate each other and disagree on everything. You see, because Uncle Gabriel is never here, and because Miss Ballato is usually trying to decide with Mr and Mrs Bickway which is the best way to do all sorts of other things, it is Cook and Nurse who are in charge of running the house and that. There isn't a housekeeper, you see."

"We don't know what this particular fight was about," pipes up the fair-haired boy. "It was right outside the schoolroom, and we were all by ourselves. Miss Ballato was in the lavatory," he says reproachfully. "Cook ran her through and then she looked terribly surprised – Cook, I mean, though Nurse did too. Then she drew a big breath and marched off. It turned out she went to fetch the doctor, but me and Peter, we had to drag her into the schoolroom all by ourselves. And then we heaved her up onto the table."

"It was only a flesh wound; she was quite well in herself, though not healed by the time she left. Which is not an hour since," explains Miss Ballato.

"Were these swords hanging on the wall outside the schoolroom? It seems a little odd of Gabriel to keep them there," Way says.

"Oh, the swords were in the schoolroom to begin with," Peter says. "Me and Patrick were having a play-fight. There are swords everywhere. Uncle Gabriel, he's paranoid, that's why he's so combative." Miss Ballato twists her mouth in the way of one being repeated. Ryan slides down in his seat before quickly pulling himself up and meeting Spencer's glance. He looks around the room to assure himself that the walls are indeed bare of swords, before realising that there is a little collection of ornate daggers in the corner. Perhaps, thinks Ryan, what they ought to be doing is making for the next county at least while all their pursuers are busy, instead of planning to rely on the unconscious protection of one of them. Not to mention that Saporta seems more to attract vampires than repel them.

Two maids enter, bringing in tea, a most sumptuous tea, on a trolley. It seems a little odd to Ryan that the governess should be receiving them like this, and that such a tea should be sent up on command with no further instruction.

Miss Ballato pours them out tea, and begins to cut slices of fluffy pink iced cake. Ryan watches her, feeling very hungry, then remembers that they'd meant to have a drink of blood after they got off the stagecoach and before they got into the house. They'd forgotten, and now he and Spencer gaze mournfully at the cake, knowing they have by no means enough blood in their systems even to think about food.

"That's why he's a vampire hunter, and tells everyone all about it," says Peter, resuming the conversation with a voice clogged with pink icing.

The visitors all look most startled. Miss Ballato peacefully forks up cake.

Mr Way's fork hovers in the air and he glances from Miss Ballato to Peter with his mouth slightly open, obviously caught between letting this go and trying to tackle it in conversation. Ryan has grown convinced that everyone knows what pallor and dark glasses signify, and he freezes, convinced that a confrontation is only seconds away. He puts his hands up to the spectacles, even though they've seen them now, and the light streaming in through the window will make his eyes water terribly.

"_Vampires_?" Brendon says unsteadily. "Are they not some kind of invented entity?"

"They're real," Patrick and Peter assure him, as Miss Ballato says, "Well, Mr Saporta says they are part of an underside to life very few are equipped to deal with. Perhaps everyone who comes across them is like him and prefers to keep their knowledge to themselves, while letting everyone know the struggle is bitter – so it only comes out in odd ways."

"But what are they like?" asks Brendon, having now got his voice more serious and interested than alarmed.

"All I know is that they drink blood and live a long time, and that they keep Mr Saporta very busy."

"Apparently they look just like real people," says Patrick, who seems to consider this disappointing."

Ryan opens his mouth and Brendon looks at him and says quickly, "But how common are they? How much of a threat? You don't seem very frightened by it all," says Brendon, who seems to be caught between struggling to make of this conversation whatever a genuine participant would, and trying to find out a few things he actually wants to know. Ryan and Spencer are not really fountains of information on the subject. He looks at Ryan sideways and shakes his head very slightly. Ryan assumes Brendon thinks he is overcome by nerves and thus about to make a clean breast of everything, just to get it over with. He assumes this because he can feel his uneasiness in the situation twist inside him with that strange urge to tell people things, that belongs to him even though he rarely does anything with it.

"I don't mean to impugn Mr Saporta at all," Ryan says loudly, not giving anyone any time to respond to Brendon's questions, "but I find it very difficult to believe these strange beasts from folklore can possibly be real. Is there not some mistake?"

"Obviously I cannot prove anything," says Miss Ballato, "and I really know almost nothing about it, but Mr Saporta behaves so much like someone who spends all his time hunting and killing these strange creatures that I can't imagine what he is doing if not that." She stops for a little think. "No, I don't think he could have made _such_ a mistake as that." She sounds a little reluctant to admit it. Suddenly remembering the cake, she pushes a plate towards Spencer.

"Not for me, thank you," he says. "Both Mr Ross and I have been ill."

Miss Ballato looks at Mr Way as if to ascertain his thoughts, being the only guest who knows Saporta. Way starts and says, "_I_ knew Gabriel hunts vampires. Did I never tell you? I mean, the reason he's not here is because he came across these particular vampires who crop up again and again like his nemesis. He drove off after them instead of coming here. I've seen them, so they are real."

"Did you not travel together?" asks Miss Ballato.

Ryan does just want to put an end to it now. This whole conversation reeks of useless cover-ups and bad acting, as Way frowns and says, "No . . . not most of the way." There is a pause as Miss Ballato looks a little confused and Mr Way looks panicked, as if he thinks he has let something crucial slip. "So," he says slowly, feeling his way, "I think Gabriel is still coming here, but I don't know when we may expect him to make his way. I'm sure he can discuss this with you then."

"Oh-" Yes, thinks Ryan, that is why Mr Way is making it clear he knows about vampires, because Saporta and Way's brother will turn up sooner or later and make it clear for him. "I must say, it might have been appropriate to tell us about this before we came here, Way."

"I didn't think it would come out," Way says, glancing at Miss Ballato. "I don't like to alarm people unnecessarily – oh, I know you only mentioned it in passing," he says, as Miss Ballato pretends to look offended. "Interesting that you have become so accustomed to it."

At this moment the door opens to admit the butler. "Mr Walker," he says, more a by-the-by than an announcement. The door closes behind him, leaving the Mr Walker in question in front of it. He is wearing a clerical collar, and he looks more as if he has come to discuss something clerical than if he has simply come to visit for the love of it. His preoccupied expression clears a little to make way for politeness when he sees the array of strangers in front of him.

"Miss, may we go now?" asks Peter while Miss Ballato is introducing everyone.

"What day is it?" asks Miss Ballato.

"Wednesday. No, we don't want our walk today," says Patrick.

"Very well, you may go."

Ryan feels a child's relief at being dismissed as he hears the children clattering up the stairs, and realises that the difficult vampiric conversation is ended now. He listens with unnecessary fervour to the conversation that emerges in its stead, and feels oddly flat as Walker explains why he is here. The Bickways, who Ryan has heard mentioned once or twice as if they have something to do with Saporta's household, turn out to be the vicar and his wife. (Mr Walker is the curate.) They want Miss Ballato to undertake to run a stall for the village fete, and Miss Ballato seems sullen and reluctant about it. She seems a little ambivalent about the Bickways, and Ryan wonders if they are the kind of people who are always meanly trying to make you do things for your own good. Spencer can be rather like that.

"They will only send me back to try and persuade you," Mr Walker says.

"Well, I will give it some thought, so perhaps when you come back I will have an answer for you. If I do not see Mrs Bickway before that," says Miss Ballato.

Mr Walker tries to make conversation with the rest of them, but Brendon seems to have decided it is best if he answers for all of them, and even does so for Miss Ballato once or twice. It is a nice, easy conversation, but a little marred by the way the rest of them have disengaged and are staring out of the window or into their teacups. Mr Walker does not stay too long.

"Bedrooms!" says Miss Ballato when Mr Walker has gone. "You may as well choose your own."

Upstairs, she strides down the corridor, throwing doors open. Ryan is a little shocked and amused when she offers them Gabriel's own bedroom, not least because the room is almost amusing in its own right. It is less tasteful than the rest of the house; it features a lot of purple, and there is a tiger-skin rug on the bed. No one takes up the offer, and they all choose relatively unassuming rooms.

When Miss Ballato leaves them, Ryan sits in his room with Spencer and Brendon. "It's almost like life is beginning again," he says, looking out of his window. He can see trees and hills.

"Nice to get out of the house, isn't it?" says Brendon, who has made so many tiresome remarks on the horror of life lived in horrid little rooms.

When the flurry of becoming accustomed to a new space is over, Spencer finds the bottle of blood they brought with them. "Only one?" asks Ryan. "I thought we said we'd take two?"

"Yes," says Spencer. "I remember that. We don't seem to have brought anything else, though."

Brendon takes the bottle and gingerly tips it up and down, watching the blood rush from one end of the bottle to the other with revolted fascination.

"And we will have to have it _cold_," says Ryan. "We will probably have to have it cold all the while we are here."

He roughly reaches to take the bottle from Brendon. Brendon's grasp is tighter than Ryan's, which serves only to knock the bottle out of his hand. He snatches at it in the air, and bats it into the leg of the writing desk. The bottle smashes and there is a pool of blood slowly sinking into the carpet.

"Damn it!" says Ryan. He crouches down and lifts the three pieces of the bottle free of the blood, looks at them for a moment and flings them impatiently at the bed. A drip of blood creates a stain on the counterpane.

"We're going to have to do something. We should have thought of this; I have no idea we can get blood from," says Spencer.

Ryan leaves Spencer and Brendon pressing their handkerchiefs into the bloodstain and shunting the writing desk forward, and goes to consult Mr Way. He isn't in his room, but Ryan meets him coming up the stairs. "I have just been to ask about a butchers' shop," he says. "There isn't one in Stellhurst, you'd have to go to Graesborough, and you won't get there today. Will you be alright for blood until tomorrow?"

"No," says Ryan, and Miss Ballato interrupts them from the bottom of the stairs.

"Mr Ross, will you and Mr Smith be attending dinner? Perhaps you would like a little soup or something sent up?"

Ryan remembers that he and Spencer are "ill."

"I don't think we will be attending dinner," he says, and as a matter of fact, he is surprised to find that he is expected to attend dinner, being an uninvited, unexplained guest, in the absence of a host to the meal. And will Miss Ballato, the governess, really be at dinner in the dining room? He turns and heads up the stairs. Out of the corner of his eye he can see Mr Way go down a couple of steps, as if to say something to Miss Ballato, but he doesn't say anything and then his footsteps sound behind Ryan.

Back in Ryan's room, the door closes behind them. "Is everything alright?" asks Mr Way.

"No," says Ryan.

"So," Brendon says, stuffing the bottle pieces back into Spencer's bag, "You have no blood around until tomorrow, yes? How serious is this? Will you just feel hungry and faint, or is it life-threatening?"

"Oh, it's not life-threatening," says Spencer. "Sometimes we went for a while without back in the attic, but it is a very unhappy feeling. Right now I have a terrible headache."

Ryan looks at Brendon's face, serious and considering, and he wonders if he is about to suggest tiding them over with his own blood. The thought revolts him, and he shies away from it, but Ryan is suddenly dearly looking forward to hearing him say it.

"Perhaps Mr Urie and I should let some of our own blood," says Way. "Would that be a good idea?"

"I'm not sure," says Brendon. "What if there's something about it that leads the consumer to want more? I thought you could go out into the grounds and find an animal or something to kill."

Ryan and Spencer look at each other. This prospect is unenticing (and Ryan is disappointed, and doesn't like Brendon considering Ryan a potential ravening beast) but he thinks that while his hunger isn't exactly impelling him out into the grounds immediately, he will regret not taking the opportunity later. On the bright side, "Perhaps we can get it over with before dinner, and then we can actually eat dinner!" he says. "We'll have to get a gun."

"I'm sure that won't be a problem. Way, you stay here in case anyone comes and wonders where we have vanished, and with any luck we will be back soon," says Brendon.

[Part Three](http://cleodoxa.livejournal.com/3581.html#cutid1)

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**In the Midst of Life 2/5**   
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	3. In the Midst of Life 3/5

  
  
  
  
  


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[bandom](http://cleodoxa.livejournal.com/tag/bandom), [bbb](http://cleodoxa.livejournal.com/tag/bbb), [fic](http://cleodoxa.livejournal.com/tag/fic), [in the midst of life](http://cleodoxa.livejournal.com/tag/in%20the%20midst%20of%20life)  
  
  
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[Part Two](http://cleodoxa.livejournal.com/3277.html#cutid1)

  
The three of them manage to arm themselves easily enough and they slip out through a side door. The day is blurring with dusk and their steps slow at once. "We may as well bear in mind to begin with that this will probably take longer than anticipated," Brendon says. "I always was a rotten shot."

They wander for a while, and see nothing. Then a squirrel makes itself just about discernable in the thickening gloom and Brendon aims the gun at it. "A _squirrel_, for heaven's sake," says Spencer, and the squirrel runs up a tree before Brendon can shoot.

"We should go to the woods over there," says Brendon. "Pheasants and rabbits."

"It's so _dark_," says Ryan. "This was a stupid idea. If we don't get something very soon we will have to fall back on Way's idea." He says this to spite Brendon, but then he wants to take it back, because surely that alternative will make him seem so very much like a vampire, and what if Brendon was right about it building an appetite?

"What's that?" asks Spencer. Something white crosses their path. They advance on it slowly and Brendon shoots.

"It's a peacock," he explains. "Did I get it? Ah yes, I did. I was hoping for something nobody would notice had gone; I'm not sure I did the right thing now. Do we need to find something else, or will that do?"

"It will have to do," says Spencer. He begins to take his jacket off.

"Oh, aren't you going to do it here?" asks Brendon.

"No. We need a knife, and something to put the blood in," Spencer says impatiently.

"But what are your teeth for?"

"I'm not biting into _feathers_," Ryan protests indignantly.

"Are you _vampires_?" exclaims a voice close behind them.

Ryan turns slowly, the skin on the back of his neck crawling. Behind them are Peter and Patrick, faces full of bright, prurient interest. "You're vampires! Real vampires!" says Patrick.

They look at the peacock on the ground, and back at the children. Spencer makes to drop his coat over it, but realises that it really is too late.

"We heard you talk about teeth," says Peter. "You can't deny anything!"

"Now, you don't need to be frightened," says Brendon, and it is another reminder that they aren't all in the same boat.

"But you're real live vampires," says Peter. "We don't _want_ to be frightened." He and Patrick gaze at them, taking on the look of hypnotised rabbits as they get caught in a dilemma. They want to be excited about this new experience, but are having difficulty in not allowing their sense to convince them this new experience might be about to kill them. Peter screws up his face and opens his mouth for a question. Ryan comes to his senses and runs for it. No one joins him, and he slows to a walk, turning to see the group still standing around the peacock. He doesn't understand why the others aren't making a break for it – do they think they can go back to the house? – but he can't really go anywhere without them.

"I've found the tree," shouts a voice in his ear, and Ryan turns and stumbles into Miss Ballato. "Mr Ross-"

Ryan stands still. "Miss Ballato, Miss Ballato!" yell the children, running forwards. "They're vampires, come and see this peacock they just killed." Miss Ballato looks confused and allows herself to be pulled forwards to look at the peacock. Brendon and Spencer scoot backwards as she approaches, Ryan following her because he doesn't know what else to do.

"What do you mean, they're vampires? What does this peacock have to do with anything?"

"You _aren't_ going to drink our blood, are you?" asks Patrick. "Now you've met us and everything?"

"Children, have you been pestering these gentlemen- Wait a minute!" says Miss Ballato, breaking off and turning to Ryan, a finger raised. "Your glasses! And you were all so awkward at explaining everything earlier. You are, aren't you?"

"Well, of course I am. Isn't it obvious? Why ever else would I have turned up in the home of a vampire hunter, if I weren't a vampire?" Ryan snaps, not knowing if he means his sarcasm to admit or deny.

"I think we need to have a conversation about this. Perhaps we should go inside?" Brendon hesitates then, remembering the host of weapons inside the house.

"We won't drink your blood now we've met you, no," Spencer says. "We don't drink human blood at all."

Miss Ballato stands still and looks from one to the other, pale and indecisive. She looks more solemn and defensive than scared. She glances off into the darkness, as if considering, like Ryan, if there was a viable plan of action attached to running away. Turning back, she says, "Well, I need to know what all this is about. We had better go inside."

"I don't suppose we can get our kite now?" asks Peter.

"Tomorrow," says Miss Ballato, and sets off towards the house. They all trail after her at her distance, Brendon stopping at the last minute to scoop up the peacock in Spencer's coat.

Back at the house, Miss Ballato rings for someone to fetch Mr Way. "Ah," says Way as soon as he enters the room.

"Yes, it's all up," says Ryan.

"Miss Ballato, we would be _so_ grateful if you could be convenient about this," Mr Way says, sitting down next to her. "The thing is, they are really perfectly nice, ordinary young men. Think of it as an illness, a purely medical illness." He goes on for a while, explaining the sequence of events that led to them coming to Ratfield Park, the others interjecting to confirm when appropriate.

"So," says Miss Ballato. "You two are vampires, you're a friend of theirs, and you're who you're supposed to be?" She points to Mr Way. "And you're not here with any sort of plan against Mr Saporta, and you're quite harmless?"

"The peacock backs us up with that, you see," says Spencer.

"I think that's wonderful!" says Miss Ballato. "Mr Saporta is off chasing you, wanting to hack you into bits – well, he puts a stake through you, doesn't he? – while here you are in his home. Ha!"

"Uncle Gabriel would be so _cross_," says Patrick, and he and Peter hug themselves with glee. They and Miss Ballato contemplate them with bright, interested eyes.

"So it's alright?" Mr Way asks. "Is Gabriel a real tyrant or something? It's just that you seem so glad to be defying him. I see him as rather bombastic, but not like a grim Bluebeard figure. Only it is you hiding the cor – the dead people."

"No," says Miss Ballato. "No, it isn't really like that. We don't think he's Bluebeard, or anyone really terrible but—"

"But he irritates the h – vexes you terribly," Way says, smiling at her."

She laughs. "I think vampires have become such familiar figures in our minds that now you are in the flesh you have become full of glamour. Mr Saporta seems to have it all his own way, as he tells it, and we have got so used to hearing about death and impaling; _that_ is a perfectly good reason to like to see him defied."

"But still, it is really very good of you to be so accommodating," says Mr Way, looking slightly startled by all this gusto.

"Really, it is," Ryan adds quickly.

"We do hear about vampires such a very great lot," says Peter. "It's like meeting Queen Elizabeth or William the Conqueror."

Miss Ballato reaches out with her foot and taps the dead peacock under Brendon's chair. "So you need some blood now, yes? I'll ring down to the kitchen for a knife and a bowl."

Ryan leans back and closes his eyes in relief for a moment. For now, everything is alright. When the utensils arrive, Spencer slits the peacock's throat. While he is draining the blood into the bowl and Ryan is thinking it is a shame they can't send it down to the kitchen to be warmed, Patrick and Peter slip out of the room. He feels a little self-conscious about drinking the blood, especially as he wants to shudder and make faces – the blood is lukewarm, which is actually worse than cold – and Brendon and Mr Way make conversation about Saporta.

After a while, Peter and Patrick slide back into the room. "I am afraid a lot of the servants want to leave now," Peter says in a hushed voice. "We have just been down to the kitchen."

"Are the two connected?" asks Miss Ballato suspiciously.

"Well, yes, because we told them about the vampires, and they didn't like it," says Patrick.

"Oh dear," says Miss Ballato. She looks hesitant.

"They are setting about leaving _now_," says Peter.

They skip after her as she sighs and gets up. Ryan thinks about a kitchen filled with angry buzzings, and people throwing things into bags in haste to get away from a house in which he is present. After a little while, Peter comes skidding into the room, excited by the dramatic atmosphere and needing to share.

"None of them are allowed to leave until tomorrow morning. Cook yelled at them. That's just to throw her weight around, though, I don't see why it's alright for them to go tomorrow but not today. Uncle Gabriel already doesn't bother to have hardly anyone look after the grounds, soon he's going to have no one for the house either. Everything will go to rack and ruin."

"Surely Miss Ballato could convince them you were only playing," says Brendon.

"I think she's already given the game away. And Uncle Gabriel likes to tell them the goriest bits, so they're particularly ready to believe and get frightened," says Patrick. "She is talking to them all very nicely, but they don't care."

Mr Way says, "Would it help if I came and said they were completely harmless?"

"I would do that as well," Brendon says.

"It might," says Peter. "You come and do that, then."

Now it is just Ryan and Spencer.

"Nice to know we can set a house about its ears just by entering it," says Spencer. Ryan watches his little grimace, resigned not rueful, and tries to imitate the way his shoulders relax and his face wipes clear of the thought. They sit in peaceful silence until the kitchen expedition files back in.

"_Not_ much good," Miss Ballato says. "At least from Mr Saporta's point of view. I mean, a handful are staying, so I suppose we'll manage. Greta at least thinks it's thrilling."

"Still, it is a great inconvenience," says Spencer.

"It isn't such a great loss," says Miss Ballato. "It's mostly Mr Saporta's army of housemaids that are revolting. We had far too many of them to begin with. He steals pretty maids he sees in other people's houses, and sends them down here. Quite pointless, when he's hardly ever here to see them. Apart from the maids, he has hardly any staff."

The butler appears in the doorway. The past few hours seem to have dishevelled him somehow. He has a note. "Oh!" exclaims Miss Ballato. "Cook knows someone who is killing their pig tomorrow, and she is offering to get them to kill it now. Dinner will surely be a while, you could have some blood for dinner and make a proper meal of it."

"We could probably eat proper food now," says Ryan. It isn't just that the servants know, he realises; all the servants know people.

"It is bound to do you some good," insists Miss Ballato. "Besides, it will make Cook feel important and I don't feel like offending her at the minute. I'm sure the only reason she isn't running away is to be contrary."

"It's dark, isn't it?" says Brendon, squinting out of the window.

"There are always lanterns. Children, you ought to be in bed. Go – oh no, Nurse isn't here, is she?" Miss Ballato gets to her feet with a sigh. "Dinner will be ready sooner or later, but we're in for a wait."

* *

Ryan and Spencer do eat dinner, but first they have to drink their specially procured blood. It is served in soup bowls, and they use spoons. This is disconcerting, not least because Ryan can't help expecting it to taste like tomato soup. He feels like their very presence is illegitimate. Despite being in a room with the rest of them eating dinner, he keeps imagining them as a gathering of conspirators, perhaps crowded round a pile of gold, whose voices are to be heard from behind a locked door.

The butler waits upon them, and also a maid Ryan decides is the Greta who thinks they are thrilling. He meets her eyes with a cold look, and finds she is already looking at him with calm curiosity.

Halfway through the meal, Mr Way decides he likes Miss Ballato, and actually moves down the table to sit nearer. Ryan can't imagine why; she is a long way down the table and even from here Ryan ascertains that her excited and helpful mood of earlier has worn off. She now seems deliberately haughty and sullen.

When Ryan, Spencer, and Brendon have finished eating, they tire of sitting in the dining room. As they come out, Greta slides out of a darkened room across the hallway.

"Are you really vampires?" she asks.

"We are indeed," says Spencer.

"I am afraid I am only a hanger-on," says Brendon.

"And you don't kill people?"

"Only people they find _very_ trying," says Brendon, tossing his handkerchief in the air.

"Can you fly?"

Brendon genuinely starts. "_Can_ you?"

"No," says Ryan. This is knowledge gained from trial and experience. Once they climbed up onto the roof and tried to take flight. They had not exactly dropped like stones, like humans, but they floundered. They managed to flounder their way into plummeting into the tree next door instead of straight to the ground. It had all been very nerve-wracking.

"We can, however, jump," says Spencer. He runs up the great staircase and prepares to demonstrate. Brendon presses his handkerchief into Greta's hand.

"Drop!" he commands. She lets it flutter to the floor as Spencer springs down the whole flight in one leap. There is nothing especially supernatural about the sight, except perhaps for one moment where he appears suspended, as if free from gravity but caught in amber. He lands on his feet, and bows down to hand her the handkerchief.

Greta beams at him. "I'd love to do that. Do you think you could jump further? Maybe you could go up to the next flight – if you climbed over the banisters there-" She points up – "It would be like you were jumping down both at once. Spencer hurries off. "Don't you jump, then?" she asks Ryan.

"I'm a little too accident-prone," Ryan says, and Brendon laughs for too long, as if to advertise that this is an understatement. Ryan puts his tongue in his cheek and cocks his head. Ryan doesn't know when Brendon decided Ryan was amusing, and not in the witty way. Sometimes it seems like he is under the impression Ryan is two people, and is trying to swagger a little in front of him by behaving like a child currying favour among its playmates by teasing another child – using him both as the person to be impressed and the ill-advised means of doing so.

"I'm coming down!" Spencer yells, crouched on the rail like an over-sized vulture about to swoop. They step back with haste.

Ryan and Brendon soon tire of watching Spencer prance about on the stairs, and go to sit in Brendon's room. It seems the amusement does not pall for Spencer and Greta, however, because it is quite a while before there is a loud crash. Spencer tried to hold Greta in his arms for the ride, and they careened into the banisters. Two rails are smashed. They are both laughing a great deal and Ryan doesn't think Miss Ballato needs to solemnly assure them that it doesn't matter. Greta does sober when she is also assured that Cook won't be told.

"She'll have heard the crash," she says, and rushes off.

* *

The next day, Mr Walker returns mid-morning. "The Vicar wanted me to pop in," he says. "The railway station was awash with housemaids earlier, and he couldn't help but wonder what was the cause."

"Oh . . . they felt rather alarmed. I don't know if I should let this out – I suppose it wouldn't do much harm so long as Mr Saporta never found out."

Everyone looks from Miss Ballato to Mr Walker with alarmed but unsure faces. Ryan is not sure that it is not best to keep the whole subject as quiet as possible, regardless of harmless consequences and the sacrifice of transparency and interesting conversation. He doesn't stop her either, though. He looks at Mr Walker's face, cheerful and casual and feels a sharp pang of anticipation to see how he will react.

"These two gentlemen," she says, indicating Ryan and Spencer, "are vampires. It is a little complicated, but actually they are here at Ratfield to actually hide from Mr Saporta. You needn't be afraid of them; they only drink animal blood and are perfectly civilised."

Mr Walker's brow furrows. "Vampires?" he says, searching Miss Ballato's face.

Spencer leans forward and bares his teeth, showing Mr Walker the sharp incisors. It takes him a moment to notice, but then he starts. He stares for a moment, mouth slightly open. "But . . . You mean Saporta actually _meant_ it when he said he was off hunting vampires?"

Now Miss Ballato recoils in astonishment. "What did you think he meant?"

Mr Walker looks flustered; he tries to turn to face her but he cannot stop staring at Spencer and Ryan. Finally managing it, he says, "Well, I was never quite sure what to make of it. Whether he truly believed it, or whether it was a game that he carried too far . . . But no, there actually are vampires. And they're staying here and they're _civilised_?"

"We aren't a threat at all," says Ryan. He is becoming tired of this feeling, at once defensive and reassuring.

"And I'll just take that on trust, shall I?" says Mr Walker. He doesn't look as if he isn't going to, exactly, but he is wondering why he should.

"_I'm_ not a vampire, and I can vouch for them," says Brendon. "As can Mr Way."

"Certainly. There's nothing sinister afoot, I assure you," says Mr Way.

"But how odd that you never believed him," says Miss Ballato. "I have seen you talking with him, you always _seemed_ to believe him. Did you never talk about it with other people, or did they – did _everyone_ think he was talking nonsense? Do not even the Bickways believe what he says?"

Mr Walker suddenly realises this is a slightly awkward moment. "I don't think most people took it without a grain of salt, no."

"Well, now I feel credulous," Miss Ballato interrupts.

"But perhaps you saw him more than the rest of us, so were best equipped to judge. And well, you were correct. I cannot imagine what the Vicar – well. Perhaps you shouldn't tell anyone else."

"Ah," says Spencer. "The Church."

"I'm sure you could make people understand the situation, and the Bickways are very kind, but the Vicar would have to consider the situation in light of his position. I don't suppose he would know which line to take, and he would have to consult his superiors and …"

"Unless of course he simply sharpened a stake and went for them," says Miss Ballato. "I don't know, he gets very dedicated."

Miss Ballato and Mr Walker seem to find this mental picture amusing, a sentiment Ryan cannot share. Mr Walker has things to do, but before he leaves he warns that Mrs Bickway may be dropping by to investigate the housemaid affair.

"If you are going to arrange a cover story, do it now, so I don't contradict it if I see her before you do," says Mr Walker.

"I think I shall have to tell her Mr Saporta ordered the housemaids' dismissal. She won't know what to make of it, but never mind. And it would be best to make as little of the guests as possible – they can be a little mystery I'm not party to. The more plausible the story, the more she'll talk to you, and there is the teeth issue."

Miss Ballato looks matter-of-fact, but Ryan does dislike feeling like he is a difficult creature, having to have awkward arrangements discussed on his behalf. He wishes everything about everything weren't so difficult and complicated. He has considered filing his teeth, but something about it seems inherently unwise.

Mrs Bickway pays a visit not an hour later. She is most perturbed about the servant situation.

"Has there been a disturbance? Is it to do with Cook? However will you manage, with Nurse gone too?"

"There has been no disturbance since Nurse left," says Miss Ballato. "Mr Saporta made the decision to dispense with their services, and I can't speculate as to his motives."

"I wonder why? Perhaps he is planning to engage fresh staff. It isn't entirely unlike him, I suppose," says Mrs Bickway. Ryan is grateful there is no address at which she can reach Saporta.

Miss Ballato introduces Way to her as a friend of Mr Saporta, and Way waves a hand at the rest of them and mutters, "My friends."

Mrs Bickway makes one or two probing remarks, and when they meet with no success looks pitiably exasperated at being frustrated in her attempts to order the household. Ryan supposes that if Saporta is considered as eccentric as Mr Walker seemed to suggest, it would be natural to feel concern for his household. She shifts the conversation onto parish affairs, and trying to convince Miss Ballato to take an active part in the fete – "Your artistic flair would be so appreciated."

Miss Bickway treats Miss Ballato somewhat curiously, to Ryan's mind. She is both to be organised and got to do things, and treated with solicitude, as if she is to be done things for. Miss Ballato plays up to both these things by being both confidingly obliging, almost like a child, talking with an unfurrowed brow and a certain sincerity in her voice, and demanding and autocratic.

Mrs Bickway casts her eye curiously over the three of them who were not introduced, but after Mr Way gently mocks Miss Ballato a couple of times, it is him her occasional sharp glances rest upon.

When Mrs Bickway leaves, Ryan looks at Miss Ballato for a while. He wonders if she has had a hard life, and that is why Mrs Bickway behaved as if she was to be treated with care. Miss Ballato sees him looking, and begins to laugh.

"I know, I always behave terribly with the Bickways," she says. "It's because they _let_ me. Somehow it takes me back to when I was a girl, a very cross, awkward girl, very proud and over-solemn. When I feel discontented I dramatise it for them because they believe it more than they ought. I paint a bit, you see, and they consider me very accomplished and artistic and so on."

"That is the problem if you once unburden yourself to someone, really lament your lot and everything," says Mr Way. "You feel silly if you come back and say, "Oh that? I feel quite cheerful now, thank-you," so you keep it up and it just reminds you of the reasons you have to be unhappy." He stops and looks indignant. "I thought she looked very disapproving of _me_, and I was the one with an explanation!"

"She did a little," says Ryan. "At least it distracted her. Perhaps she thought you looked disreputable."

"Why would she think that?"

Ryan considers Mr Way's hat, his hair, his clothes, his shoes. "You look like a villain out of Dickens," he says. Unfortunately Mr Way is charmed by this and swaggers about throughout the day, lisping and cursing and spitting on the floor.

* *

The time lies empty ahead, an unspecified length of it. It is like a holiday that might be interrupted at any time by Gabriel returning to evict them more thoroughly than any angel. Ryan feels caught between relief and dread as Saporta's absence continues. Spencer seems to have decided to make hay while the sun shines. He and Greta follow each other about the house, making eyes and smirking mouths at each other.

Brendon seems to have relaxed. He is being helpful, trying to smooth things over like he did in the beginning. He steps in to apply his easy manner to dealings with the village, which makes their presence more plausible, providing a kind of context without ever offering a story. Like Mrs Bickway, if Stellhurst at large is aiming a disapproving glare at anyone, it is Mr Way, though Ryan doesn't know what expectations they have the right to form of a guest of Saporta's. He is good at distracting the children when they make Ryan and Spencer feel awkward, following them about and asking questions. Somehow they get on to music, and Patrick expresses an interest in the piano. A little to his surprise, perhaps, Brendon finds himself teaching both Patrick and Peter the piano, though Patrick has decidedly more aptitude.

* *

Ryan remembers how uncomplicatedly grateful he felt to Brendon when he first involved himself in their affairs, and cannot decide whether or not he is ready to allow himself to return to that feeling. Brendon's warmth had made him feel almost as if he was being spoilt. He is interested and easy, and Ryan is so used to having no one but Spencer. And neither Spencer nor Ryan has been sparkling company the last two years. Spencer is – well – not being alone, the status quo. He is not indulgent, or an indulgence. Mr Way also makes a nice change, and he is also warm and interested, but he is interested in a more bemused, self-absorbed way. After a while it started to grate on Ryan that Brendon was more important to Ryan than he was to Brendon. He talked in that interested, easy way to everyone. Probably he was always unnecessarily helpful and concerned about people he didn't know. Ryan felt as if he was latching onto Brendon like a child with a favourite uncle – who may be visiting a lot at the moment, but may also get tired at any moment and go off to do something else.

He detached himself from the "known each other for years" atmosphere that Brendon creates, only odd moments revealing that might be deliberate. Ryan was slow to turn round when spoken to, spoke as little and politely as possible, and often wondered aloud that Brendon did not have anything else to do.

Brendon seemed to notice this distance more than he had noticed Ryan's simple fascination. Now Ryan felt as if he had some particular relevance to Brendon, but it was not exactly positive. Brendon had always been gregarious and talkative, but now he became impossible to shut up. Spencer took to talking over him, his voice muffled by the pillow over his head. Ryan could actually admire the art of simply talking on and on, after all those word games and nothing much to comment on besides the blood clot one just spat out, and how bored, cold and hungry one was. Ryan could see that Brendon earned himself space in the world because he didn't mind making a fool of himself. It was not as if his personality was so golden, but the mixture of happy-go-lucky and nervous energy won him a privilege of expression Ryan sometimes envied.

Brendon took to spending even more time in the back bedroom, and Ryan felt like Brendon was on some kind of quest. His bid to capture Ryan's attention often involved pulling faces and impromptu dances, as if Ryan was a princess in a fairy story, whose swains line up to try to make her smile. Sometimes Ryan did. He didn't when Brendon attacked from another direction and became competitive. He made digs about life experience and sophistication, and sometimes even became so vulgar as to refer to wealth and social position. When Brendon pursued this tack conversation further devolved into long, pedantic quarrels. Ryan always threw, "I am but a poor vampire clerk who has been sitting in an attic for two years," into these, as if it were a source of virtue. Sometimes, though not often, these disagreements also almost became smiles, in acknowledgement of their shared foolishness and obnoxiousness.

On the whole, however, Ryan's attitude to Brendon was one of hurt, defensive umbrage. He expected to Brendon go away for good, but apparently he was too piqued by the revelation that there was an argument between them that he wasn't winning. Preparing for the inevitable retreat, and the general instability of Ryan's situation made him feel as if he was in a permanent state of flux. Matters fluxed further when they exiled themselves to Ratfield, and it seemed as if Brendon would surely be lost in the move, but no. Ryan had a click on his tongue; he wanted to say to Brendon, "You're carrying it _this_ far?" Because truly, pugnacious attitudes aside, this Brendon person - this person, rich and serene who wandered into the Ways' house – why did he choose to divert his life away from its natural courses, to spend his days on this trouble and strife?

Now they are here, and Brendon is being entirely normal now, as if he has forgotten all that childishness, and it actually does take two to quarrel. Ryan looks at him and wonders why he is here, and trying to make everything be as easy as it can be, and can only conclude that is because he likes Ryan and Spencer and does not want anything to become a disaster for them. Now he feels faintly foolish for imagining affairs were more complicated than they are, a pang of disappointment that they aren't, and relieved gratification.

On the whole, he feels like he wants a rest from Brendon, and preoccupying himself with what he's thinking, and whether he is behaving the way Ryan wants to behave. He ignores Brendon a little now, doesn't spend much time with him alone. Being so used to a confined life, it makes Ryan feel odd to realise he can avoid someone. He has to remind himself to adjust to this slightly larger world, that need not have the same people in it all the time. Brendon seems slightly puzzled, but Ryan doesn't let that change his behaviour.

Mr Walker is replacing Brendon, in a way. Ryan is gratified that Brendon likes him, but he thinks that Jon (they are on Christian name terms now) might be coming to like him too, and he can't help chasing the feeling of accomplishment he has waiting for him in the future. It is not as if there is anyone else apart from Brendon who is interested in keeping him company. Spencer is busy with Greta – he hangs around her even when she is in the kitchen, smirking and asking Cook if she is going to run him through. Obviously Spencer is not a worthy opponent, because she hasn't yet. Mr Way sleeps late in the mornings, and is often to be found in Miss Ballato's company when she is not giving lessons. Mr Way asked to see her paintings, and they sat and looked at them and had a solemn conversation about them until something made them smile and laugh at each other over nothing. Now they repeat the pattern all the time.

Jon comes to visit a lot; apparently he is generally encouraged to keep an eye on the place, but has recently volunteered his presence more than usual so that Mr and Mrs Bickway do not feel they need to visit so often. He is quite pleased to make Ratfield such a dominant feature of his daily round.

"No one else I have to visit wants me there," he says. "I had a boot thrown at me yesterday. I hardly ever get sent on nice simple errands like solacing the dying and reading to the elderly. The Vicar keeps sending me to people who do not want to be done good to and resent being accused of being full of pride and resentment, or not kind enough to their relatives, or whatever the Vicar thinks is the matter with them."

"So we are a nice change because we truly do have a problem," says Ryan, smiling. "There still isn't any way you can help us."

"But you are nice and don't throw boots at me," Jon says. "So I have to take shelter with you."

Ryan doesn't say anything but he can, in a way, see why these people don't enjoy Jon coming to see them. He has an unsentimental cheerfulness that rather rains on people sometimes. It is also obvious that he is not in the Church through any particular choice of his own. Used to Mr Bickway's fervour, the parishioners resent the braced, yet wincing resignation Jon feels for a life he is unsuited for.

"I think perhaps it shows too strongly that I would not, ideally, choose to be a clergyman," says Jon, as if he can tell what Ryan's pause was filled with. "I don't know if it's simply that I am not especially religious. Bickway's all very well, but a lack of real conviction is common enough in the Church. But I don't think I'm overly concerned with people other than myself, and perhaps that shows."

Ryan laughs. "You're already better than most other people if you're worrying about it." He likes that Jon wants to do his job as well as he can, though he has not much taste for it. He also likes that Jon seems glad of his company; it makes him feel he must be more gregarious and light-hearted than he thought. He thinks that he would like to live up to that and stop brooding over everything.

Once Jon has got over his chagrin that vampires have existed all along, he becomes fascinated by it all, though he tries not to show it. He asks hesitating questions, as if he thinks it is impolite to be curious. Ryan doesn't mind, though he does not know the answer to a lot of the questions; it makes him feel fascinating rather than appalling. Mr Way and Brendon and Miss Ballato have all pretty much dismissed the subject when they got used to it. There are Peter and Patrick, of course, but their curiosity _is_ irritating.

Jon seems charmed by the fact that he is a vampire, and yet not at all frightening. Ryan is pleased to have this effect, but really, the effort involved is minimal. He finds Jon relaxing because there is something relaxed about Jon; it makes Ryan feel cheerful both in itself and because he feels that not much is being asked of him. It makes a nice change from all that worrying about what Brendon was thinking.

He likes Jon. He likes him rather like he liked Brendon when he started coming to see them at Way's. It is a feeling that makes him feel more human, in a way that is actually vampiric in origin, using others as a panacea. It's also a private feeling – something warm and sticky and crumpled about it – and it feels encroaching to have private feelings about people. Ryan sticks by Jon and follows him about like a young animal with its mother, needing to learn from a place of safety. He doesn't know why, but he keeps thinking the word "flank" in this context.

He thinks of other things too, those thoughts he had even before he was Turned, and had the luxury of worrying more about them.

* *

He and Jon frequently go walking together, and Ryan likes that. It seems to make Jon more aware that he is not on duty, and he becomes freer and more cheery. A couple of times they tackle the hills. One of these times it is drizzling lightly after days of rain. They slip and slide about in the mud, and Jon falls on his knees but it is Ryan who falls flat on his back and also skids down the side of the hill almost to the bottom. Jon starts laughing, and carries on laughing for so long Ryan begins to ignore it and talk to him almost as if he is a civilised human being, interrupted only sporadically by his own bouts of laughter.

Jon is still laughing when they reach Stellhurst and Jon's house, both of them caked in mud and damp if not wet. Ryan stands in Jon's hall for a few moments before turning around to return to Ratfield. Jon reaches round Ryan's shoulder to open the door for him, and he presses his mouth to Ryan's. His mouth is cold, but still warm against Ryan's lips as his hand on his shoulder turns him around and pushes him out of the door.

Like those things in his head, thinks Ryan as he walks swiftly down the street, trundling through puddles. Only he's used to all that being thought, that feels alien, saturated with unreality even in his own head, so it feels so very, very odd out in real life. Was it really that? That press was so brief, and just skin on skin like an accidental touch of hands, perhaps. Did Jon's face merely get too close by accident? Nothing like an _I want you_ acknowledgement. _And I like your spit and your tongue and your teeth too, and I want you to open your mouth just because my mouth is here._ People could not do that without creating a different place, shared between them. And it hasn't happened, so Ryan is still in his own place, and Jon is too. Ryan doesn't think that other place even exists between men because if it did it would be . . . cold and muddy, like Ryan is now. Ryan doesn't know what Jon is thinking about in his house now, and he doesn't know why he is feeling like a fool, laughing to himself as he goes along the street, either.

* *

"You still have mud in your hair," says Brendon, looking around as Ryan laughs. They are in a drawing room and Brendon is playing the piano. Ryan is sitting with him this evening, to distract himself from his thoughts, and Brendon seems surprised and pleased. He is very conscientious about practicing but just now he is actually playing crashing chords with just enough variation and selected repetition that it sounds like a glowering composition. He seems to be enjoying himself. Ryan watches his calm face, and then his plunging wrists. He piles up several cacophonous crescendos on top of each other until the melodrama reaches an actually amusing height, and Ryan laughs.

"Very likely," Ryan says, not even bothering to feel. He hadn't realised how thoroughly he was coated in mud until he got to Ratfield and everyone fell about laughing.

Brendon turns back to the piano. _Trouble! Trouble!_ say the keys. Ryan props an ankle on his knee, and presses his chin to the topper-most knee. He thinks about that cold, muddy place in his head and wonders if there would be a way to make it seem more habitable, if he cannot prevent himself from wanting to go there.

* *

Ryan sees Jon the next afternoon, and has been with him for an hour before it occurs to him that either of them might possibly not let it be an isolated incident. Well, _he_ isn't going to do anything, but he is only just now realising that it was not really a closed little box of time, however it seemed like it. They have the power to bring that little box out into the real world, part of continuing time, with consequences. There is no awkwardness between them, as if they are deciding whether or not to do that – or at least not until Ryan suddenly jerks his head up and examines Jon's face, wide-eyed. He quickly lowers his lashes as Jon falters in his speech.

It is nearly two weeks later that Jon, quite deliberately, strokes the back of Ryan's hand. Ryan's breath moves, and he makes an invisible movement – for an instant, he almost thinks he has snatched his hand away, to where it is just his hand and nothing that anyone can use to affect his life. But he doesn't know why he thinks that, even for a second, because his hand doesn't twitch at all. And then he wonders why he is wound up inside as if fearsome consequences are crowding at his back, when Jon's fingers, gentle on his skin, don't feel at all alarming.

* *

Now he has Jon's tongue in his mouth, because this is another time, and he has begun to think that he might allow himself to do this. Ryan sucks on Jon's bottom lip, hard, because he wants to be like this. He wants to be standing this close to someone, with their hands on the back of his neck, their hips pressed to his. He feels gratified that it is Jon; he has that warm feeling of discovering he has something in common with someone. However, Ryan can't quite rid himself of the feeling that, considering the trait they share, feelings of disappointment and disapproval might be more appropriate. Ryan might not be able to conquer his vices, but is that any excuse for Jon's similar inability?

"Do you like it?" asks Jon.

"Yes," says Ryan, because his cock is hard, for heaven's sake. He wants to be do this badly enough that he wants to get over the feeling he shouldn't want to do this. Ryan's sure he could make his mind up the way he wants if he tried hard enough. It isn't as if he has begun to think of morals or anything. He just can't admit things hard enough to get him into the here and now, where he could actually have those things. Ryan wants someone else to make him come, that's what he wants. Part of him can't believe his luck in having got hold of someone who might do that. But he feels so ambivalent, and Jon seems nervous, too.

"I don't want to do anything more today," he tells Jon.

"But do you like it?" says Jon. "If you are just shocked and don't know what to say—"

"No, I want it," say Ryan. He thinks Jon hardly knows what to do now he has got somebody to do this with him. Because if this is the sort of thing he wants to do, surely he must just want the rest of the time. He thinks it must be quite a big thing for Jon to have met him, and that makes Ryan feel uncomfortable, and worried about letting him down.

* *

The next time they meet, they are both uncertain and anxious, and it as if they have to force themselves when they both lean over to kiss at the same time. It makes Ryan feel silly that they are expending all this thought, hope and dread on this thing that they behave like they do not want to happen. They are both afraid of this central, brewing _thing_, and are trying not to be in order to achieve the thing they are frightened of. Nothing about it seems sensible.

Ryan realises when he thinks about it that he has never been very religious. He doesn't much mind if God thinks he is wicked because he does not, in his heart of hearts, believe in Hell. It is more of a social fear, of somehow being found out, discovered on the sofa in Jon's private sitting room. But then, religion is involved peripherally, because of Jon. He may not have much conviction, but he is a clergyman. Ryan feels somewhat responsible. If he lets Jon carry on with this, will he be burned by repentance and mortification later? Might he then resent Ryan?

* *

It happens a few times more, and they go a little further. They feel each other through their clothes, and Jon undoes Ryan's shirt once. Then things go awry.

They have both taken their shirts off and they are kissing, Jon's hand on Ryan's back, Ryan clasping the back of Jon's neck, when their mouths come apart and Jon rolls his head back suddenly. Ryan's face skims over Jon's neck and he feels as if he has lost his place. Then he realises Jon is _offering_ his neck. Ryan has never thought about the blood in people's veins, because sometimes it is not really that difficult to avoid being a person you do not want to be. Sometimes the thought of being that person is simply too dreadful to contemplate.

But now here is Jon's neck, and his mouth is right against a pulse. Ryan opens his mouth and very slowly licks Jon's skin where it rises over a vein. Jon clutches at his shoulders. Ryan wonders at him. Isn't it enough to be doing this with Ryan at all, without elaborating on it to bring in the fact that Ryan could kill him? It isn't as if he is so particularly exciting; almost anyone could kill anyone, really. It doesn't take that much to bash someone over the head with something heavy when they aren't expecting it.

Ryan darts his tongue over the vein again. He hears Jon try to sharply suck in breath without gasping, then negating the effort by giving a little moan at the back of his throat. How powerful he is, stooping slightly over Jon's neck, making him feel things. He opens his mouth over the vein so that Jon can feel the two little sharp points of his canines. Fangs. _Fangs_, it makes him feel like a kind of humanoid snake, the way the devil is sometimes portrayed in pictures of the Fall.  
With incoherent thoughts of _oh, let him then_, Ryan nips his teeth together.

He hadn't actually thought about there being blood under there. He hadn't bitten him very hard, so it is more a flavour in his saliva that puzzles him for a few moments. Jon has gone very still. Ryan reaches down between his legs, and feels that Jon is definitely hard. He mouths the shallow little wound, sucking harder and harder until the tinge of blood seems to be gone. Then he digs his teeth in harder, and blood spurts into his mouth. Ryan stops at once. He doesn't know what vein this is – he doesn't _think_ it's the jugular – but this is sex. He doesn't want Jon to suddenly not be here, leaving him worrying what to do with the body.

Ryan puts his chin against the wet, tilting up to look at the underside of Jon's face.

"Please," says Jon, and Ryan wonders now if Jon has been thinking of this all along.

Ryan's cock is hard now. It was before they started on the neck bit, then it wasn't, so much. It's like a leap of fondness for Jon, who is after all being such a fool on _his_ behalf. He puts his tongue against the wet, and allows himself to savour the blood on his tongue. It is so perfect, neither cold or too hot, its consistency so _consistent_, the taste just right. Ryan stops thinking about Jon and starts thinking about blood as he sucks at the little tear he made. The blood flows into his mouth a little thicker.

Jon taps at the side of his face. Then he taps again, harder.

Ryan looks up, mouth wet. "Oh," he says. He'd forgotten about everything apart from the blood, and that wasn't what he'd come here for. He'd forgotten Jon was Jon, that he wanted to see him naked, wanted to come, wanted to make him come too. "Oh, what did you have to do that for?" he asks. "It changed it, everything." He stands back, his hand to his mouth.

"I'm alright, Ryan," says Jon. He looks at him anxiously and wipes a trickle of blood from his collarbone.

"Why would you want me to do that?" asks Ryan, scrambling back into his clothes. "Why would you want to remind either of us that I'm not even human?"

"Oh," says Jon, "I didn't want to make you feel like that was the most important thing, really I didn't. I just—" Ryan opens the door. "I don't see why it matters if I liked it," Jon calls after him. "Nothing dreadful happened."

Ryan nearly runs out of the house. He thinks he may be burning right through with shame. Everything is spoiled, and surely he will never find anyone else to do that with him. It is not that he thinks he couldn't go back to Jon and start again, as far as Jon is concerned. But as far as _he_ is concerned, he can't. Ryan feels like Jon let him down, allowing him to betray himself like that. He has gone off him, which is inconvenient but unchangeable. If he associated his activities with Jon with ill-doing before, the feeling is increased tenfold now he knows more about himself. He is angry both with himself and Jon.

* *

At Ratfield, Ryan is greeted by a great thud as soon as he opens the door. Brendon, sprawled at the foot of the stairs, gets to his feet, patters back up the stairs and hands a silver tea tray to Patrick with a flourish. Patrick sits down on it and toboggans down the stairs. Ryan glares as the tray and Patrick shoot down the stairs and plough into his leg. Patrick looks up, while kindly removing himself from Ryan's foot as requested, and his gaze stays where it is.

"Haven't you got anything better to do than help the children make a racket and a nuisance of themselves?" Ryan asks Brendon.

"I'm not just helping, I am making a racket and a nuisance of myself likewise," calls Brendon, hanging over the banisters.

Peter peers down through the banisters at Ryan. "You've got blood all over your mouth. Have you gone bad?"

Ryan darts aside to find his reflection in the hall mirror. He's sure he wiped his mouth, but it is still heavily smeared with blood. He searches for his handkerchief but can't find it. Patrick, looking dubious and keeping out of arm's reach, hands him his.

"I don't want it back," he says when Ryan has spat into it.

"Has something happened?" asks Brendon, coming a little way down the stairs.

"No. I haven't done anything bad, I promise," Ryan says quietly. By that, of course, he means only that he hasn't left a gutted corpse behind him.

"You've got a guilty face if you ask _me_," Peter sings out.

"Where is Miss Ballato? Shouldn't you be with her? Having lessons?"

"Lesson-time is over," says Patrick. "If Nurse was here we'd have to be in the schoolroom with her, I suppose. I mean, Miss Ballato is in there actually, but there's nothing to do in there. And Mr Way is in there, and they're talking all the time. He was telling her about toads, he used to live in a pond."

"Hmm," says Ryan, going up the stairs, and about to edge past Brendon and Peter.

"Do you think you can get along without breaking a limb?" says Brendon. "I will see if I can break him." He is looking at Ryan oddly, a slow smile starting across his face.

"I don't think I want to know if he's really killed someone," says Peter.

"I will tell you if he hasn't, and it will set your mind at rest. If he has, you'll just have to remember what your uncle told you about sharpening stakes, and we'll get him while he sleeps."

"Threatening me is not amusing!" says Ryan, genuinely shocked.

"Why _have_ you got blood all over your mouth? I don't mean to persecute you on your table manners, but it's not as if you were at table and it does seem a little odd," says Brendon, steering Ryan into Brendon's room.

"It's nothing to do with you. I haven't killed anyone."

"Did someone let you bite them?"

Ryan says nothing.

"I don't know why anyone might have thought it was wise to let you get a taste for human blood," says Brendon, in an almost, but not quite mockingly censorious voice.

"I'm not some kind of vicious dog," says Ryan.

"No, no. Oh, let's drop the subject if you find it so troublesome. How are you getting on in general? I have seen so little of you."

"I'm fine. It's nice to have . . . a slightly broader horizon."

"Some of us aren't so lucky as to have our time accounted for. I have of course been terribly left to myself lately," Brendon says, raising his eyebrows at Ryan accusingly.

"Have you," says Ryan. He sits down on Brendon's bed and feels overcome by weariness. He stares at his hands and wonders whether if he allows himself to wallow in self-pity he will react against it and feel alright again. He stops staring out of the window into the blue sky and stares at Brendon instead. How nice it would be to be someone else! How much better to be Brendon, who owns none of this mess, and is only here on a tourist trip from his wealthy life of leisure and peace. There is only Spencer he can really rely on, Ryan thinks, and it's not as if either of them have bothered to stick together like usual in the last few weeks. Everyone else, Brendon, Mr Way, Jon, Miss Ballato, everyone who speaks to him, and, in their own way tries to make his life better, is so recent, and can leave his life just like that.

You'll blow away like a leaf, Ryan thinks, looking at Brendon. He looks at Brendon more, not _at_ him, more the shape of him. He thinks about how nice it would be to be in the space Brendon is taking up, and then he could blow away free instead of Brendon. Then he catches his eyes, awkwardly, on Brendon's. Brendon raises his eyebrows at him, and neither of them look away.

"I would like to kiss you. May I?" Brendon asks.

Ryan stares at him even harder. What _does_ he think he's talking about, he thinks. Why is he saying that? Ryan is like that, Jon is like that, why does Brendon think _he_ is like that? Brendon isn't like that at all, he is a nice normal, wealthy young man. Or is it some kind of joke? He looks at Brendon, his head tilted back a little, dark eyes gazing steadily at Ryan. Something irrational makes him understand then – of _course_ Brendon could manage to be a nice normal young man from a good family, and like that as well, and not seem uneasy in his position like Jon did. Because Brendon always seems comfortable. Ryan looks back fleetingly over the time he and Brendon have known each other. There is that feeling again, of surprised pleasure at having something inside himself matched in someone else, but this is _Brendon_, and there is surprised retrospect. There are things between them, aren't there, things they pass back and forth? The way Ryan used to care so much what Brendon thought. But all that, between him and Brendon, can't it be used like that real kind of attraction? The blood skitters in Ryan's veins at the thought of Brendon being attracted to him.

He leans forward slowly, his head ostentatiously cocked in the kissing position. His lips are parted so Brendon can see his fangs. Brendon leans forward so that their mouths meet. Ryan points his tongue and pushes at the seam between Brendon's lips. Brendon opens his mouth and meets Ryan's tongue with his own. He puts his hands up round Ryan's face and touches his tongue to the little sharp needle-points of his canines. Then he licks Ryan's upper lip, tracing the cupid's bow.

Ryan realises he is sitting back on his heels on the bed, not reacting. He gets up and strides out of the room.

Shortly afterwards the bell rings for dinner. Ryan feels most odd and can eat very little. He feels inebriated but not in the usual way. As if something he thought he wanted began to flow in his bloodstream as if it belonged there, before Ryan made the conscious decision to take it. He cannot get away from images of cake, treacle pudding and blancmange, symbols of immature, regretted indulgence. He _thinks_ most of it is the ingestion of human blood, and his not being used to it, rather than any emotions he might be feeling.

He feels disorientated, disconnected, as if he is being taken away from himself. Ryan thinks it no wonder that William and Victoria are so bloody odd if human blood has such an effect. He feels as if he is tied to a kite that is rising higher and higher in the sky, dragging him with it. His feet pound on the ground, as he runs, both trying to keep his place and giving the wind momentum as it pulls at him.

As dinner ends, Ryan looks up and catches Brendon's eye. Out of the corner of his eye, however, he sees Spencer leave the room, and thinking of solidity, something to hold on to, he hurries after him. He goes up to Spencer's room with him.

"You alright?" Spencer asks. "You look a bit odd."

"I'm alright, yes," Ryan says. He thinks about telling Spencer about what happened, minus most of the context. He thinks Spencer would understand how terrible it was, but then, what is to be gained by disturbing Spencer? Perhaps he can get over it without giving Spencer responsibility for making things seem better, as he has done so often in the past.

Spencer says something about the picnic he and Greta apparently had today, and it suddenly occurs to Ryan that Spencer is not worrying himself overmuch about foisting himself and his vampiricism on a human. Perhaps, if he could just get his head round the idea of being involved with another man, he could be as serene about the matter. Ryan remembers that Brendon apparently knows something about being with other men.

When he leaves Spencer's room, feeling somewhat cheered though he hasn't unburdened himself, he walks into Brendon, who happens to be in the corridor.

Ryan stops and opens his mouth, but Brendon closes his fingers around his wrist and pulls him into his room. "I'm going to bugger you," he says. It sounds so vulgar and attention-seeking, said like that. It reminds Ryan of all Brendon's irritating behaviour, and he is surprised to feel a rush of fondness, remembering.

Brendon pushes Ryan so that he is sitting on the edge of the bed, Brendon running his fingers up and down his arm. Then Brendon launches himself at him so Ryan is lying underneath him on the bed. Ryan pushes Brendon up and off him a little so he can breathe, then meets Brendon's mouth. So he is going to find out what it is like, after all. He pushes his hips up into Brendon's, and Brendon starts undoing his shirt. Ryan does not help him but watches Brendon's flushed, concentrating face. He waits for Brendon to seem at least a little frightened by what they are doing, but he sees only unhesitating enthusiasm. Despite the events of the day, this makes it hard for Ryan to take alarm himself. He raises himself up so the shirt can be discarded altogether, and Brendon puts his open mouth on Ryan's nipple.

Ryan wants him to lick his other nipple, but Brendon sits up and looks around the  
room for a moment. "I need to go and looks for something," he says, and leaves Ryan lying alone on the bed. Brendon reappears not five minutes later, waving a jar. "Miss Ballato's cold cream, I have no shame," he announces.

"Is that so you can get—" begins Ryan.

"So I can get inside you," says Brendon. "You understand it, don't you?"

"I know what buggering is," Ryan mutters. "Why can't I do it to you?" he says.

"So I can show you!" says Brendon. "Wouldn't you like me to show you?"

"I'll _see_," says Ryan, watching as Brendon takes his clothes off. Naked, he scrambles over to Ryan and kisses him, and undoes his trousers. Ryan follows Brendon's gaze and looks at his cock, already wet at the tip. Brendon strokes it, smearing the moisture across the head. Ryan's stomach swoops as Brendon leans down, and he sees another drop well up before Brendon licks it off. He doesn't take much of Ryan's cock in his mouth, just tongues at the slit while Ryan rocks his hips. When his mouth is not on him, Ryan struggles into a sitting position and reaches for Brendon's cock. It's hard and hot, and Ryan rubs across the head like Brendon did to him. Brendon holds Ryan's hand around his cock and pushes it up and down before reaching for the jar of cream.

He scoops some out with one hand, and pushes Ryan down on the bed with his other. He kisses Ryan's neck, licks his nipple again, and strokes the cream into the skin around his hole. Brendon reaches for the jar again, and strokes it into Ryan's arsehole this time. Ryan tries to decide if he likes the feeling, and Brendon takes his cock in his mouth as he slides a finger into him. He reaches for more cream before he puts the second finger in, and the sheet is getting messy now. As Brendon stabs the two fingers in and out, sucking his cock again, Ryan decides he does like the feeling. Another finger, and Ryan is grasping Brendon's wrist and the back of his neck.

"Shall I?" asks Brendon.

"Yes."

Brendon covers his palm in cream and strokes his cock. He kneels between Ryan's legs, pulls them a little further apart, then tugs a pillow out from under his head and pushes it underneath Ryan's hips. Considering Ryan one last time before the great moment, he says, "Draw your knees up a little."

Slowly, he pushes his cock into Ryan. It feels a little uncomfortable, but better when he's all the way in and rests still for a moment. When he starts to move, resting his hands above Ryan's shoulders, Ryan makes a breathy, rather embarrassing giggle. He puts a hand on Brendon's back and pushes him down a little so his cock has more friction against Brendon's stomach. He listens to his own wavering giggle and Brendon's quick, gasping breaths, warm on his face, until the warm feeling in the pit of his stomach steadies, and all he concentrates on is the rhythm of their bodies as it builds. Then the feeling washes all over him suddenly and he comes with a little cry.

Brendon raises himself up higher and thrusts into Ryan a few times, fast and hard. Ryan watches his face as he comes, then collapses on top of him. After a moment he pulls out of Ryan and rolls over onto his back.

"That was nice," he says. "And now we had better put our clothes back on," he says after they have got their breath back. He produces a quite obviously dubious crumpled undershirt. Ryan mops himself up a bit with it anyway, before he feels fit to climb back into his clothes. He stands, awkwardly, while Brendon leisurely puts his clothes back on. His shirt half buttoned, he hooks his elbow round Ryan's neck and draws him in for a kiss, a deep, messy one.

"Go and find a nice constructive way to spend your time," says Brendon, and Ryan leaves. As for nice and constructive, he waits to see how he is going to feel about doing that, and about Brendon, and Jon. Most of all, he thinks about the nagging desire he already feels to do it again.

[Part Four](http://cleodoxa.livejournal.com/3676.html#cutid1)

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**In the Midst of Life 3/5**   
_


	4. In the Midst of Life 4/5

  
  
  
  
  


**Entry tags:**

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[bandom](http://cleodoxa.livejournal.com/tag/bandom), [bbb](http://cleodoxa.livejournal.com/tag/bbb), [fic](http://cleodoxa.livejournal.com/tag/fic), [in the midst of life](http://cleodoxa.livejournal.com/tag/in%20the%20midst%20of%20life)  
  
  
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[Part Three](http://cleodoxa.livejournal.com/3581.html#cutid1)

  
As lunch ends the next day, they look up at each other and go to Brendon's room, hurrying up the stairs. They both take off their clothes as soon as Brendon locks the door, and then turn towards each other. Ryan moves his hands towards Brendon's shoulders, but Brendon backs away from him and lies down on the bed without being pushed. Ryan gets on the bed next to him and dips down to kiss him. Then he pushes himself down Brendon's body, bypassing his neck. He puts his mouth onto a nipple, circling it with his tongue. Ryan tests the little tag between his teeth like Brendon did to him, and then remembers he has bad associations with teeth. He licks down Brendon's chest and abdomen until he arrives at his cock, bobbing up perpendicular to his stomach.

He ruffles his pubic hair and takes his cock in his hand. Brendon jerks his hips up and moans, in encouragement more than appreciation of anything Ryan is actually doing. Ryan puts his hand at the base, and runs his hand up the shaft a couple of times.

"You're looking at it as if I'm going to be asking questions later. I don't like it," Brendon says. Ryan laughs in surprise and runs his thumb over the head. He puts his face into Brendon's pubic hair, and feels the wiriness against his tongue. He puts his tongue on the shaft of Brendon's cock. "No, no," says Brendon. "Back off with those teeth. Can I –" Brendon begins to sit up and Ryan crossly pushes him back down. "I see not," Brendon says.

Ryan straddles him, and lines their cocks up. Brendon moves underneath him as his hips roll. Ryan draws in a breath as he puts his fist round both their cocks and begins to pull and stroke. Brendon's puts his hand round Ryan's, and Ryan likes the heat of his hand on his cock.

After a while he climbs off Brendon and reaches for the jar. Brendon sits up with an air of breaking for freedom while he can, and rolls onto his stomach. Ryan holds the jar in one hand and trails a finger of the other hand down the small of Brendon's back. When he reaches his arse, Brendon spreads his legs wider. Ryan trails his finger down the crease between his buttocks, and undoes the jar. When he has a good amount of cream on his fingers, he goes back to the crease. He puts his finger against Brendon's arsehole and pushes his finger in. He feels almost as if he is alone, with Brendon silent and facing away from him. It feels odd. Ryan adds a couple more fingers, one at a time. He has to sort of work them in, but it isn't too difficult. He is leaning on one elbow, chin propped on his hand, feeling even odder poking his fingers around in someone's arse in a quiet room, when he apparently does something good. Brendon whines a little, and puts his hand between his legs.

Ryan takes his fingers away and takes some more cream from the jar. He slathers it over his cock and kneels between Brendon's legs. Ryan thoroughly enjoys himself fucking Brendon. There is nothing difficult about it at all. He has heard the word "fun" used to describe sex, but put it in the same bracket as "naughty", a coy yet seedy reference. But this is fun, thrusting in and out of Brendon, tight and clenched around his cock. He leans his hands on Brendon's shoulders, slippery with sweat, for support, until he reaches a hand underneath Brendon's stomach and finds his cock. He feels the wet spurt between his fingers and takes his hand away to again brace his arms for the final thrusts. Ryan comes, pulls out and lies on the bed with Brendon for a while. He looks at the ceiling, and the sky through the window, and Brendon's face, and just for this moment life looks bright.

* *

Things wake up after being lulled of course, and when they do, the one that squirms and pokes most is the way Ryan cares much more now about the letters that come from Saporta and Michael Way, disclosing them to be chasing vampires still. He had wanted life in general, before this, but now he wants each particular little package of time that arrives with each letter. It didn't use to matter, the way it does now, whether he dies this week or next week. Of course, when it gets to next week, it is this week, and now he needs the life there is between now and next week. It is the running-tied-to-a-kite feeling.

It is not too bad with Jon. Ryan talks to him, low and not looking at him much, and explains that he has changed his mind about doing those sorts of things. Jon nods a lot and apologises and says he understands. Ryan thinks Jon is disappointed, as Ryan was when the prospect he was just getting accustomed to became unviable. He is uncomfortable too, both that Ryan knows he wanted him to bite his neck, and at having precipitated some kind of crisis of conscience. But then they don't talk about everything that happened, try to find other things to talk about instead. It will make the whole thing seem so much more unpleasant if their friendship dies a sordid little death, and Ryan likes Jon. He doesn't want to feel like he abandoned him to the memory of that humiliating, bloody moment when they both went too far. So they are friends, and Jon still visits almost as often and they still go for walks, though Ryan has less time now.

Because he does do _that_ with Brendon again. Often. Whole hours pass on Brendon's bed. They get to know each other's bodies doing the things there are to do in the ways there are to do them. The daubed shine of saliva and semen on skin, the dimly perceived shape of Brendon on top of him as Ryan fucks him, and tips his head back, eyes almost closed. Their clasped hands, interlaced fingers, the flicker of Brendon's breath on Ryan's neck as he fucks him, when Ryan lets him. Their limbs mixed up together. When they know these things, it doesn't mean they aren't as good the times after that. They know what to look forward to when they do them over again. Sometimes they count them off in their own particular order, sometimes they contrive to find things different yet when they come upon them in another way. Learning lines in a play, so that it is always the same play, yet can be played new almost infinitely.

Ryan finds it difficult to know why he thinks of Brendon as remaining unstained, why  
he doesn't blame him for doing this. He does wonder if he is so – well, _ungallant_ \- to think that Brendon is to be pity-patronised with a "he knows not what he does." Ryan decides that Brendon's reckless quality, that always irked him, partly because he thought it might be a relief to own it, is less unintelligence as he sometimes claimed but more deliberate foolhardiness. The archetypal fool, prancing about at the cliff edge is indeed at the cliff edge, but whatever happens he gets to have his prance. Brendon has already been blithe and strange, after all, falling in with vampires met at the seedy house of a discredited spiritualist. He wanted to help them, and spend time with them. Ryan thinks of him almost like a clay idol, made out of that same ground that Ryan was trying to grip to in his imaginings. He is unharmed by the heat of flames. Ryan tries to imagine the flames touching him, unsure whether he would like to have company, or if he would prefer to feel soothed by contemplating Brendon's untroubled-ness.

One of the other things that wakes up is the desire to delve deeper into Brendon's soothing imperturbability.

"Do you think this is wrong?" he asks Brendon.

"I don't think it's any more wrong than a lot of things people do and don't worry about in the slightest. Do you think it's wrong?" Brendon is sitting up, beginning to get dressed and he looks down at Ryan intently.

"No," says Ryan, and he doesn't, though that doesn't exactly mean he feels right with it.

"I mean, I do a lot of those other things that might not be _right_, but everyone does anyway. No one actually tries to be good in everything they do, all the time. There's a reason people go on about saints. I don't see why I should try to be perfect," says Brendon, slightly defensively.

Ryan says, "Hmm," and lets it go, only to bring it up a few hours later. "Your parents would probably think this is worse than those other things."

Brendon stares at him in puzzlement. "I can't think about them all the time. Sometimes you just have to know how _you_ feel about things."

That irritates Ryan, because Ryan does not entirely know how he feels about things. He probes at the subject a little more. At first Brendon thinks he is being tastelessly flippant, then he gets cross at being questioned.

"I suppose when I was a lot younger I did take "being good" more seriously. You know, a good Christian. But then I realised that God probably didn't exactly agree with us – _people_ – about anything, and there seemed no particular reason why he would agree with my parents more than me. And I'm not _bad_, so I don't see why I should be more afraid of God than anyone else." His voice becomes more and more offended, and a little hurt.

"So your fundamental belief," says Ryan, "is that you can do what you wish?" This appears to be the case, though Brendon is not exactly leaping to declare it. Ryan doesn't mind much now he considers what is behind Brendon's placidity. There is a calm, unmalicious selfishness in him that doesn't get troubled about things he wants to do because it is automatic in him to approve of himself and what he wants. It is too basic, thoughtless and useful to its owner for Ryan to take issue with.

Ryan only regrets that he does not possess Brendon's heedlessness. He exists in a state of astonishment that the intoxication of self-disgust can mix with the sexual fervour, apparently without diminishing either. He does try to cut through the self-disgust, though he is not sure that it is something he _ought_ to be aiming for. Ryan finds the idea of his and Brendon's lives intersecting with a romantic climax of any permanence so risible he actually sniggers, and it is not as if he wants to laugh at himself. But for all that, he would still _like_ it, and he experimentally tries to clear the thick, aged thicket that stands in the way. He finds that the thicket is terribly thick indeed, and with unhappiness about being an unnatural dead creature, too, more unhappiness than he has ever allowed himself to face.

His body is more anomalous than anything he could do with it. When he thinks this, Ryan realises what has been behind most of this anxiety about being with another man. Spencer's liaison with a human seems to be cheering him up no end, but then Greta is a girl. That makes Spencer feel more normal, not less. Almost everything in Ryan's life is made up of secrets he can share with hardly anyone. For all his best efforts, he cannot make complete peace even with himself about being a vampire, and liking to be with men. Now he has thought of it, Ryan cannot think of one without being reminded of the other and eventually the wish for one innocent thing he does not have to worry about gets the better of him.

On the day he has almost made up his mind to tell Brendon this, he is in his room, thinking about it when he hears a yell and a series of clatters and bangs. He rushes out of his room to find that Brendon has fallen down the stairs. At first he thinks he is lying at the bottom, but then realises Brendon is crouching in agony over his ankle. Even so, almost Ryan's first thought is, well there you are! He could be here one minute, gone the next – he's _human_.

The doctor is called, and it turns out Brendon's ankle is not even broken, only badly sprained. Still, when Ryan sits with him to offer his commiserations, he feels panicked, as if he has been left in charge of something fragile. Everything is so much more serious for someone with only a short little mortal life, that could end with any accident. Ryan wonders if he ought to be taking up Brendon's time when it occurs to him that even if they actually settled together, all of Brendon's time wouldn't take up much of his time. This sets off a whole train of horrified thought, and he has no hesitation in making his final decision that Brendon is just too complicated to deal with.

The next day he seeks Brendon out and tells him, "I don't want to do that anymore. It makes me nervous."

"Not at all? You want to stop for good?" Brendon says, looking uncomprehending, on the verge of indignation. "But we've been perfectly happy. What exactly makes you nervous?" he asks.

"What, exactly, makes you nervous?" he asks. "I suppose you think it's wrong."

"I don't know. I can't help thinking about it and I can't decide. I wish I could just get used to it, or decide, but it just mills around in my head."

Brendon screws his mouth up. "I _hate_ crises of conscience," he says. Ryan wonders if this has happened before. "Can't you just stop thinking about it if you find it so complicated?"

"_And_ I'm a vampire," says Ryan, ignoring this question.

"I don't mind," says Brendon. "Don't my opinions count at all? I like being with you, _I_ don't find it difficult. Most of the time."

Ryan doesn't much want to share his thoughts on human frailty with Brendon, so he simply makes a regretful face.

"Oh, you just be miserable by yourself then!" shouts Brendon, and hobbles out of the room.

A couple of hours later he comes back. "Could you bear to still be friends?" he demands. "I would like to still be friends, if that isn't too difficult for you as well."

"I would like to be friends," says Ryan quietly. Brendon nods and leaves the room again.

The atmosphere they settle into after that is actually, for Ryan, easier than what came before. It is, however, terribly glum. Ryan and Brendon still speak, though not often alone, but that also has an odd atmosphere. It is as if there _had_ been seething, not-speaking resentment after the bright period, but then someone died and they had to put the resentment aside to agree on the funeral arrangements. Ryan fails to define what they are, allegorically, burying. He does still want those moments on Brendon's bed when he knew that whatever there was in his life that had got him here, he was glad of it.

* *

* *

Gabriel and Michael, meanwhile, have been living in another pocket of the country altogether, following their own sequence of events. They begin by driving off after William and Victoria that day outside the inn.

Before they do lose them, there are several occasions when they might. Sheep let into the road just after William and Victoria's carriage passes through, a carriage that has the audacity to take to the road when it conveys neither of the important parties in the chase and then get stuck. A road that rounds a corner and then splits into two. They survive this once, when they blindly take the left, and see, far in the distance, the speck of the carriage that has now become imbued with personality. Then it happens again; Gabriel orders the coachman to take the right and they drive for miles in that empty stretch of road before Gabriel decides to go back to the turning on the left. It soon becomes apparent that that road, in turn, has multiple turnings.

"That's a nuisance," Michael says.

Gabriel stops hanging out of the window and thuds back against his seat with a sigh.

"You never thought we _would_ catch them," he says crossly. "You have become accustomed to not catching them. It isn't the status quo, I'll have you know-" He puts a hand over Michael's mouth as he opens it to say something about rhyming. "Obviously before we catch them there has to be a time when we haven't caught them. But we _will_ catch them."

"So what shall we do now?" asks Michael. "I suppose we can't get on to Ratfield?"

"Certainly not. We will ask at all inns, and train station, and observant-looking people I can find in the area," Gabriel says, which was what Michael thought he would say.

* *

"_Don't_ say 'pallid faces, and did you notice particularly sharp canine teeth?'" says Michael. "People will think you think you are hunting vampires, and they probably won't even get wary of you, they'll just make fun. Just mention William's ruff, people will know if they've seen him."

"Don't be absurd, people are far too simple even to seriously conjecture I would be speaking about vampires. They would have to think about it even more to conclude that I was deluded, _which_," Gabriel waves a finger, "They wouldn't if they actually had seen them, in which case any vampire connections would soon ring horribly true." There is a pause. "I don't think anyone will actually catch on, do you?"

"Very unlikely," says Michael. Gabriel's rapt contemplation of Gabriel As The Lonely Hero would be undermined if there was any possibility of other people heroically battling vampires, despite the fact that he ought really to be rallying the nation to annihilate evil. Vampires are his sport, albeit one that stands in for brooding walks on the moors, and attempted gluts of disgust at one's own superficiality. He wants no poachers at his game. Michael doesn't count, of course.

* *

While they are making inquiries around the area in which they lost William and Victoria, they hear of a dead prostitute. On hearing that the whole venture is officially back on, Gabriel seems to feel the wholehearted rapture of a girl receiving a long-awaited lover's letter. From Gabriel's point of view, these tidings usher in one of those classic eras.

They spend nights lurking outside public houses, skulking in back-streets and alleyways, as Victoria and William leave victims strewn behind them. The string is quite obvious, though made up of more prostitutes, and vagrants. Victoria and William are no longer merely following the whims of their zest for the kill. They have given in to the foolhardy, masochistic charm of the gingerbread man chase.

Michael and Gabriel can't discover what William and Victoria do with themselves during the day, where they stay, but at least two or three nights a week they discover not only their traces, but William and Victoria themselves. Michael can see how it bears the mark of those eras; you are almost too busy living them to be aware of them. Sometimes they startle them away from a body, swooned or dead, held in a limp arch by their clutch. Sometimes they become aware of them as the sound of clattering, fleeing feet as the vampires hear them coming. They seem to panic easily. Michael grows accustomed to running down narrow alleys so fast he almost falls over his feet. Gabriel thunders ahead of him, a sharpened stake in his hand as he yells, "We are on your _heels!_"

He grows rather accustomed to the sight of Victoria and William's heels.

This does not take place in one, extended area. The victims strung on that string are taken from several cities. Sometimes Gabriel and Michael get left in one city while William and Victoria – Michael imagines them with an air of perturbation – get on with killing in the next, for the little while before Gabriel becomes unreasonably certain this newspaper article relates to them, and sets off. Michael rather likes the feeling of ranging over the country, though he is mostly making his acquaintance with the more insalubrious parts of it.

And then nothing else happens. The trail goes dead. Gabriel is more indignant than anything else; Victoria and William seemed to be playing along so well – how _rude_ of them to abandon the game just like that.

In boredom and affrontery, Gabriel looks up some of the people he knows of more than he knows them, but has the power to know. If he weren't busy with vampires, or bending the ears of the rural clergy on the aforementioned. Some of them are the kind of people he has to push to get to know, being of unknown, foreign background. Michael goes with him, and nonplusses people when they try to work out whether they ought to bother with him.

Anyway, it is through this defiant indulgence in frivolity that Gabriel hears where William and Victoria have got to. Michael thinks the conversation begins with how things always seem to happen to people at the same time. Someone pipes up with the mysterious malady striking down several young ladies of their acquaintance.

"It is like consumption, but the doctors can find nothing wrong with their lungs. Or indeed, anything in particular wrong, though I believe Miss Parlow complained of inexplicably bruised ankles. It is simply as if the life is draining from them. I am most concerned for Sophie, Sophie Dormand my cousin's daughter. She has complained twice of people, malevolent people, coming to her in the night. She is quite convinced of this, and believes they are responsible for her malaise."

Michael looks at Gabriel, and smiles as he sees him sitting forward in his chair, alert and still.

* *

Two days later they are sitting in the Dormands' drawing room with Mr and Mrs Dormand, a brother, and Sophie herself. Sophie looks most wan and is really confined to bed but insisted on getting up to speak to the gentleman who has announced he is here to discuss her illness. She is exhausted to the point where her eyelids keep descending over unfocused eyes, but her voice can be heard alright, as though she is walking and talking in her sleep, plaintive and indignant.

"So you know about these people in the night? I knew I was right, I knew there was some kind of conspiracy," she says.

"I do know about them." Gabriel pauses. "None of you are going to _like_ what it is, but I can't help it if it sounds silly. It is vampires."

"Vampires?" Sophie says blankly.

"Vampires are real things?" says Mrs Dormand.

"Those east European peasant things that live in graves?" says Mr Dormand. The parents look from Gabriel to Sophie. Their patronising dismissal of these night-time experiences is replaced by a willingness to take this collaboration as aid to believe their daughter and make things a little simpler.

"Yes. Though . . . they don't really sleep in _graves_," says Gabriel. "I find them and kill them, to give me peace of mind. I know exactly which vampires are preying on you. I have been trying to hunt them down for a while now. They were born in the sixteenth century, you know."

"You mean they have been sucking her blood?" asks Mrs Dormand, disgust pulling at her upper lip. "But how? After Sophie made such a fuss I've been sleeping in her room."

"Well yes," says Gabriel. "Sleeping. They are stealthy. Mostly they managed it so that Sophie was asleep and stayed asleep. When you were there, they did the same."

"But my neck is not marked. They bite your neck, do they not?" asks Sophie, suddenly doubtful.

"Are your ankles bruised, or at least tender?" Gabriel asks.

"They are bruised! Most lividly, I wondered why," says Sophie, pulling of her shoes and tugging down her stockings to demonstrate. Her family's faces move a little, in disapproval at first, then deciding the occasion is more medical than unseemly. Everyone looks at Sophie's ankles, the insides of which are marked with large black circles. Behind the black is the redness of blood raised to the surface. "So you mean to say these creatures have been gnawing at my ankles? Are they _men_ \- or do vampires have men and women?"

"Well, they're dead _people_, says Gabriel. "These particular vampires go by William and Victoria."

"Why did they bite her _ankles_?" asks the brother, who looks most taken aback and unhappy.

"The marks were less conspicuous," says Michael. "And they had only to pull up the coverlet, they were far less likely to disturb her."

"The second time, I kicked them and told them to go away. But I was so nearly asleep," says Sophie.

"So I suppose if we bar the window and whatnot, they will just go away and find someone else?" says Daniel, the brother.

Gabriel looks at him as if he is mad. "_No_," he says. "They are supernaturally strong, I am fairly sure there is nothing you could do to the window that would keep them out. And as soon as they saw that you had done any such thing, they would know at once that I am involved. Sophie would become, more than ever, a point they are proving to me."

"Surely Mr Saporta is going to kill him, that is what he does," says Mr Dormand.

"Exactly right," says Gabriel. "So! You should put poor Miss Dormand back to bed and feed her some red meat, and Michael and I will come back at bedtime."

* *

So here they are at ten, six people in a dark room.

"It's a complete waste of time, beginning to wait so early," says Gabriel. "They're going to leave you a good long time to get deeply asleep, and they like three or four in the morning best, anyway. But we have to be _certain_."

Sophie is in bed, endeavouring to sleep. Mrs Dormand is lying fully clothed on the other bed, Mr Dormand has a chair, and Daniel, Gabriel and Michael are sitting on the floor. Daniel is sitting near the door, and Gabriel and Michael crouch by the window. Mr Dormand, a keen archer, apparently, has a bow and arrow. He does not own, nor was able to obtain in the interim, a pistol, and felt the need of a weapon however often Gabriel explains that a stake is the thing. He sits bolt upright, arrow aimed at the window, and starts forward, bow raised, at the slightest sound.

At these slightest sounds, Gabriel and Michael creep and crane about to try and see through the curtains, while remaining in attack position. Michael climbs up onto the bed to do this, which is by far the best vantage point, but Sophie suddenly begins kicking him, paddling at his legs until he topples off. Mr Dormand keeps hissing "Get off! Are you an idiot, get off!"

He keeps up an angry monotone all the while, actually. It seems to spur Mrs Dormand to a contrary display of light-heartedness she can't really feel, what with her daughter and everything. Daniel dozes against the door.

And then there is a sound. All heads turn to the window. It sounds like the sound of body on windowsill. Then there is the sound of the catch being jiggled softly, and a sudden draught of cold air as the window slides up. Legs appear on the floor underneath the curtain. The legs' feet are wearing William's boots.

Gabriel lunges at him, and Michael knows it is too soon. William's ears are still listening to the room, and his body is still listening to his ears, ready to retreat at the first indication of disturbance. Gabriel's hands grip his shoulders, stake pressed harmlessly against one, and William's leg kicks up and gets a purchase on the window frame. Then he is fighting his way free of Gabriel to scrabble his body into the window, and he falls/jumps/slides down the side of the house, knocking Victoria with him on his way.

Gabriel hangs out of the window, having kept a grasping purchase on William until he slid out of reach. "Damn it, damn it, damn it!" he howls, watching William and Victoria pick themselves up. He jerks towards the door, but that is quite pointless. They will be gone before he can get downstairs and out of the front door, and he won't even have the dubious satisfaction of seeing them leave. Mr Dormand is pushing aggressively at his shoulder, and Gabriel turns and snatches the bow and arrow.

He shoots at Victoria, and she dissolves into dust. Gabriel looks, startled, at the bow, while William flicks a handkerchief out of his pocket, quick as a flash, and lays it on the ground as the dust falls down. Gabriel levels the bow at William as he swoops off, with the handkerchief. Mr Dormand pushes another arrow into his hand just as he disappears out of range.

"I always forget about the dust," says Gabriel, melancholy, staring out into the empty night. "Whatever you do to them – or to the dust – you cannot destroy them. Unless you get them through the heart. I don't know why it works like that."

Michael had seen Gabriel looking, body still, when Victoria disintegrated. Looking to see William and his Walter Raleigh handkerchief gathering in her dust. Michael doesn't know what Gabriel thinks he'll do without William and Victoria, if ever he succeeds in doing away with them. Michael has got used to them himself, and he thinks if it ever comes to pass it will be nasty. If the past tense converts Victoria and William, he thinks Gabriel will lose a lot of himself.

* *

The next night they all gather, and sit again, but it is very listless. None of them think the vampires will turn up. The Dormands are cautiously relieved, but still on edge, and bored that they have to go through this again. The next day they have managed to arrange to leave their house for a few months, to be on the safe side. Poor Miss Dormand is only now waking up to the full horror of the whole affair, and keeps saying, "I have been ill for weeks because people were gnawing on my _ankles_ every night! It is so revolting!"

With Gabriel and Michael, there is more of an emptiness. It is hard to tell, actually, why they think the vampires will not come back to the Dormands' that second night, or any night after that. Michael is not sure they are all that brave, but their urge to tease and taunt, to make sure Gabriel is following, usually consumes most of their caution. But they have a feeling, and Michael and Gabriel's gloomy acceptance is proved correct. Gabriel reducing Victoria to dust is marked by a pause, as he and Michael smelt in the air. They do not want to see him directly after that.

* *

After a few days of boredom, and bored asking around, Gabriel hears of a train station sighting, and is off after them again. (Not in a train, of course. They crash.) It is like that for a few weeks. If Victoria and William kill anybody, they don't let it be widely known, and there does not seem to be any more sucking on nice young ladies, either. They do leave a sighting behind them always, and it is a dangerous game like they like to play. They have to calculate when Gabriel will receive his sighting, and be confident that this sighting is always far enough behind them that he will not physically coincide with them.

Gabriel gets tired of the game. He finds himself a grand hotel at which to settle down for a while.

"I'm not chasing around after them any longer," he says. "They'll come to me if I stay still."

"Nice to have a rest," says Michael, not offering an opinion on this.

Having made the decision, Gabriel seems to cast William and Victoria, and vampires in general, out of his mind. He enjoys himself with the other guests, and plays the romantically absurd rich foreigner, flirting with the ladies. He brings out a guitar to play to the ladies, sometimes embarrassing them, sometimes flattering as he sings to them. Sometimes, with no especial rhyme or reason he will choose some poor soul to focus on and kneel at her feet, gazing imploringly into her face.

* *

Gabriel goes out for a walk one night. It's entirely extra-curricular; he has simply grown to like dark streets and night air. He comes back to the hotel expecting to have to wake up the staff. And there is Victoria, sitting on the flight of steps. Gabriel feels a whisper of movement at his back, and there is William, shifting from one foot to the other.

Gabriel sits down on the steps, below Victoria, and looks up at her. She is wearing many strings of teeth around her neck. It is odd; they are not pearls but even visually there is a weight to them – her neck must be quite bowed down by the rope created by those strands – that implies value. Of course the value is not monetary or aesthetic, but purely in the added fearsomeness.

Victoria sees him look, and smiles. "They are ridiculous, but then I am ridiculously fond of them," she says. She leans forward. "It is good to be alarming, is it not? To happen to people, though no one knows you are something that might happen. It has that glamour, like a heathen idol who orders people's lives to play out their smallest caprices. When you are one of the shadows shifting scenery in the dark between the acts."

Gabriel looks at her and feels. Different things. A rush of _that is what I want, what I want to be_, and shame to recognise something that belongs to him, here of all places. And, with a kind of dismay, the realisation that whatever damage they cause, for whatever reason, if you want to be a scene-shifting shadow, it is a sure sign you are not. It is merely a posture, a human desire to make life important.

"My enterprises are entirely different from yours," he says. "And I may operate at night-time, but not in the darkness you do. People know what I do. I don't keep it tucked away from them."

"What a liar!" says William.

"You don't tell the _world_, and set everyone to wiping out the scourge of vampirism. Because you probably could, if you did that, you know," says Victoria, picking up a strand of her necklace so she can admire it. "But you tell people in your village you hardly visit, who possibly believe you on one level and no other, to whom it seems too far away and nothing to do with them. They are not going to disturb you in your doings. We want to kill people and you want to kill us… and stop us killing people, but our doings are very much alike."

"And all of us do it, or at least we enjoy it, because we want to feel superior. It's a  
greed, isn't it, that takes you striding down dark streets thinking that what you do tonight matters, but you don't know quite what for," says William.

"I'm afraid you are the ones greedy for something dramatic and devastating you will never really have the power to give yourself. I live an earthly life, contented and cheerful in many ways. There are already two of you. Why do you need more companionship?"

William and Victoria look sulky. "It you don't feel emptiness, and hunger, with a depth and poignancy that we do, then you'd _like_ to. Because that would be someone to be, that would take up space. You want to be a distinct _flavour_ of human being; you want a gimmick, because then you'll only have to peer out of yourself to see what you project. You won't have to put any effort into being, because you can take your cue from your outside and fall into line with that.

"What a lot of convenient things you have accomplished then, feeling so sorry for  
yourself," says Gabriel. "You're getting mixed up. All right, so I'm ambitious, and would like to think of myself as someone pretty spectacular. Not that I take myself quite as seriously as you, for all that, and for all that you need not really concern yourselves at all about anything, being dead. But I don't want as much as you do, because I'm alive and you're dead. You want to prove yourselves more than I do."

Victoria and William glare at him again, and Gabriel feels. Sad, really. For them, all of a sudden, because they are dead. He thinks about the other vampires, who he killed. He didn't know them very well, but there is something similar about all of them, he thinks now. The way they are bored and nonchalant, but have their passions. And perhaps that is a little like him.

Gabriel stands up, makes to be pulling something from his coat, and makes a sudden dive at Victoria. She has no time to do more than shrink away before William gets him by the scruff of his neck and yanks him away furiously, baring his teeth. Gabriel laughs in his face, and William lets him go. He and Victoria stand silently by as Gabriel makes his way round the side of the hotel, where he looks at all the lighted windows. He finds a room whose occupant he is acquainted with, who will not find it terribly alarming and odd if he climbs into their room with an off-hand excuse, and Gabriel ends the night with the living.

* *

"I am tired of all this," says Gabriel. "Let's go home."

"Oh yes," says Michael. "Poor Alicia—"

"Well, no, _my_ home," says Gabriel. "Let's go there."

Michael can't really think where to divert him. The man will just have to be allowed home. Gabriel does seem tired. A little pensive, but mostly tired. Michael sends a letter, saying, "We are coming. Ross and Smith must be tucked out of sight." He is, for a couple of days, unwell, so they do not set out immediately. Gabriel seems restless, yet Michael is not aware that he sets foot outside the hotel before their departure.

* *

* *

So at breakfast one morning Ryan watches Way with his letter – and he is _still_  
watching Way's letters like a hawk. He still feels almost like he did before, but he doesn't understand why; he isn't doing anything with Brendon anymore. Ryan can see that this letter is shorter than usual.

"This is it," Mr Way says, looking up. "They're coming here."

"Ah. Have they got William and Victoria, then?" asks Spencer.

"Well, it doesn't _say_ anything about them, so he could have been more helpful. I don't imagine Gabriel would be just leaving them to it, so either they really have done it, or they've just lost them."

"I so hope they're dead. Forever," says Spencer.

"Oh, well, we must just get on with it. I will take an apartment in London and the three of us can stay there while we ascertain things," says Brendon.

"Oh no, we couldn't possibly," says Ryan. "You've become mixed up with us so randomly, you really mustn't feel as if anything means you bear any responsibility for us."

Spencer is scowling at him. "You can't tell him he cannot make his own choices," he says, meaning, _People are coming to get us! Who cares if we're imposing?_

"I can certainly make my own choices," says Brendon. Ryan thinks for a moment he is being mock-angry, voice tight, eyes wide and defiant and hands fisted around his cutlery, but no, it appears he really is offended. "I have not got mixed up randomly, I made a decision to make you my concern. I do a kindness to myself when I try to keep your hearts away from someone who wants to impale them."

"Well, exactly Ryan," says Spencer.

"I do wonder if we will be able to keep it from him entirely," says Miss Ballato.

Ryan thinks about that, and other things. He does not think he and Spencer will go and live in the boarding house again. He supposes Mr Way is going to marry Miss Ballato, and Michael has that girl he's left at the house, so things will change. And what exactly will he and Spencer do with themselves?

"It would be rather nice if we could live in Stellhurst," he says. "We could, if it wasn't for Saporta."

"Perhaps Mr Way and Miss Ballato could try and persuade him not to kill us," Spencer says hopefully.

"I'm sure we could try," says Miss Ballato. "I find it easy to get to him. He can't get away from me."

"He could dismiss you," says Spencer.

"Oh, that won't occur to him."

"I will say you're just perfectly nice people, and I'm Mikey's brother. Surely that must count for something," says Gerard.

"I feel a little sad we won't be here to see how things go on," says Brendon.

And it is so nice, the feeling of having people between them and the people who would kill them, so heartening compared to the attic. And Ryan feels so warmed that Brendon cares, and it reminds him that, he _liked_ me. He wanted to be in bed with me, and he still likes me though I said I didn't want to do that with him anymore and he didn't understand. They still like each other, and sometimes, that seems like such a _thing_, a lovely thing to have, for all that it is awkward, and prickly and disheartening now.

Things are arranged, and Ryan, Spencer, Brendon and Greta (who insisted on accompanying them) depart for London the morning before the afternoon on which Gabriel and Michael arrive.

[Part Five](http://cleodoxa.livejournal.com/3863.html#cutid1)

_   
**In the Midst of Life 4/5**   
_


	5. In the Midst of Life 5/5

  
  
  
  
  


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[Part Four](http://cleodoxa.livejournal.com/3676.html#cutid1)

William and Victoria are in London. Across a crowded street, they spotted Spencer, so now they are in the same situation as before – they know their quarry is here, but not exactly where to find them. As it turns out, that isn't too much of a problem.

* *

Ryan and Brendon are in the sitting room, idly watching branches scrape across the window when Brendon gently picks up Ryan's hand and holds it between his own warm ones. "Do you think you could feel more settled in your own mind about what we were doing doing, now?" he asks.

"_No_," says Ryan with a wave of exasperation, tugging his hand away. He sits back and looks at Brendon, who also looks exasperated and tries to think how to explain himself to him. He falls back on, "Not now," and slips out into the late evening, damp after the rain.

What should it have to do with Brendon anyway? He wanted to protect his and Spencer's lives, but what was there to _like_ about him? In some ways, theattention he gives him definitely attracts Ryan to him, he cannot deny that. He has a cheerfulness, and Ryan likes that in people. It is what he likes about Spencer, and Jon too. But theirs is rather brusque, and while Brendon's is not exactly understated and mellow, there is a fluidity and movement to him. It seems like things would be easier if Ryan went with him, though he is also easy to quarrel with, so Ryan doesn't know why he thinks that.

He walks past a little knot of people, and realises just before he is past that their faces have turned towards him.

"Found another one to kill me, 'ave you," says a voice. Ryan turns and sees a woman, the owner of the voice, sinking near to the pavement in William's grasp as Victoria lets go of her arm. Victoria's fingers are just above Ryan's shoulder. Ryan shrinks away, but now her fingers are around his wrist, and William is stepping forward, dragging the woman. His fingers close around Ryan's other wrist, and now that they are all standing in a kind of circle, the woman sags forward onto Ryan's chest.

"You can have _all_ the rest of her," Victoria says, and Ryan sees that the woman's throat is bitten.

"No, no," he says, trying to pull away. Victoria slides her fingers over the woman's throat, reaching the wound with difficulty because the woman is laughing helplessly into Ryan's neck. But her fingers come away dark with blood, and she thrusts her fingers into Ryan's mouth. It is a tang, like unripe blackberries. Ryan bites Victoria's fingers, partly in demand that she get them out of his mouth, and partly because despite this he is sucking at them hard.

"Now come, Ryan," says Victoria when she has her fingers back. "Don't you think you ought to have just one? You must drink and drink just once, really you must. Go on, you know we will kill her anyway."

Ryan bends his head so that he can smell the blood. "Is that what you want of me?" he asks. "Is that why you won't leave me alone?"

"We think you ought to know what it's like. If you're not human, you may as well be a vampire," says William.

Just once . . . Ryan feels cut off from so much, so many opportunities and experiences that the properly alive have. Won't he have a little more than he has right now if he experiences the undead side of life? He bows his head, and puts his mouth to the woman's wound while he decides. There is all the blood on his tongue, but then he thinks, _teeth_, and bites to make the wound deeper. The blood spilling out, filling his mouth. He wants to taste it but somehow he has gone blank, even while he swallows it down his throat with the knowledge that this is _it_, hot and thin, yet thick.

While he kills this prostitute, he is where his body is, but not _in_ it. The confines of his body now fall far within the confines of his self. He is in the damp black street glinting under the lamp, and in the fresh smell of rain, that is one of _ascent_ even while it comes _down_. He feels like a sheet of electricity rippling through the street, into the stone and dry, set hard powdery-ness of bricks, and into the sky.

He can barely hear Victoria and William, but they are talking. ". . .Want to look _after_ you and Spencer," he hears. "We ought to be together. We are the same. We ought to create something that is our own, and then we wouldn't mind anything. You wouldn't feel so dead if you embraced your own kind."

He turns their voices down, and turns away from them. He drinks a good, long drink,  
and it feels like a whole dream, a whole story, a whole life . . . A nuanced adventure. Then he is aware of something falling down his body – another body. He feels a distant pang of irrevocability, having done something he meant to stop and left it too late. Late, late, late . . . Ryan's brain comes up with _dead_.

He bolts, stumbling over the body, and runs. Victoria and William are after him at once, and get hold of him again, but he is running fast and strong now. Though sometimes he tries to fling them at trees and walls, he can still run while they tug his arms. It is almost like they are running together, almost as if William and Victoria are running away from themselves, like Ryan is running away from them. He wants to tell them that it isn't going to work, but he hasn't the breath.

Still they try to talk to him, and why are they so lonely, anyway? Why do they need him? They have each other, like he has Spencer. But he remembers how Brendon makes him feel, so yes, perhaps to be dead is to be lonely and that is why he wants the living so. Victoria and William weigh him down unavailingly, like they hope to overcome with deadness the living. They like power too much to cosy with the living, so they try for defiant solidarity in death. They try to overcome that brightness they used to possess with something they know, really, to be inferior, so reluctant are they to admit the sadness and inferiority of death. Ryan already knew he hated being a vampire, but he hadn't seen these dank deep ditches to fall into.

He runs, the two of them slamming into him. He sees the image of those ditches, rather than feels the despair they represent, because Ryan's soul still thinks it resides in the streets. It feels trapped, despite the expansion, and wants to rise up into the sky, where the cold would soon be sharp and numb. Ryan hears William say, "It is no good," and a few moments later he realises he is alone. He is full of hot electricity that sends him trotting mindlessly until he stops. He puts his hand on the cool of a lamppost and swings slowly around it. Then the heat comes out of him as the painful start of a cut-off, horrified sob. He has killed someone. Taken their life just so he could take their blood into his veins. Ryan wanders aimlessly until he realises he is at the entrance to the street he is staying in.

At the door, he feels in his pockets for a few moments before realising he forgot the key. He knocks at the door and waits, and sees a curtain twitch as someone peers nervously out. The door opens and there is Brendon.

"You've been an awfully long time," he says, looking both worried and relieved.

Ryan stands still and says nothing.

"Ryan? What's wrong?"

Spencer appears in the doorway, shouldering impatiently past Brendon. He drags Ryan into the hallway. "What's happened?" he asks. Brendon closes the door and looks horrified and uncomfortable, as if he thinks this is all his doing. Then his expression changes.

"Is that blood?" he asks.

Ryan goes past them into the sitting room, sits down and begins to cry. Spencer sits down next to him and puts his arm round his shoulder while Brendon and Greta hang back in great perturbation. He puts his face in his hands and sobs for a long time with all of them growing progressively more impatient to know what the matter is.

Spencer's arm round his shoulder begins giving him encouraging pats. "_Look_, if you'll just try and breathe, you'll be able to stop crying," he says, the pats become more like impatient wallops, as if Ryan is malfunctioning. "I'm guessing something has gone wrong somewhere that will need doing something about. The sooner you spit it out, the sooner we can sort it out."

Ryan shrugs Spencer away and crosses his arms defiantly. "I bumped into Victoria and William in the street. They had a woman with them. They were killing her and they offered her to drink from. And… I don't know why, but I did, and it was me that killed her. Then I ran away from them." He looks up at them; they all look horrified. He thinks he might have hoped just a tiny bit that they would tell him it wasn't such a big thing.

"Well," says Spencer. "Well. You needn't feel like they or, well, _you_, really did it just because you're you. It's because of being a vampire. It might have been me." He pauses and lets out a big sigh. "We might have known something like this would happen with the vampirism – vampirism _is_ more gruesome than we ever admitted."

Greta just looks at him, her face astonished blank.

"But I don't want to be a vampire. I don't want to be gruesome," says Ryan, guilty memories of Jon flickering in his head.

"Well of _course_ you don't. Neither do I, but we haven't any choice in the matter. It is mostly William and Victoria's fault. They just have no right to do these things, do they? You wouldn't have done this yourself, but they've thrust it onto you, and now you have got to own it for something you did. I feel so _angry_ with them, I wish with all my heart Saporta would slaughter them" says Spencer.

Ryan looks at Brendon. He looks a little sickened, and Ryan wonders what he thinks of him now. Brendon sees him looking and forces a little smile. He gets a damp cloth, and carefully cleans the streaks of blood from Ryan's face. Ryan can feel Brendon's anxious eyes on him but he can't meet them.

"I suppose you may as well take comfort that the woman probably had a wretched life. And she would have died anyway," says Spencer.

"Probably even if the other vampires hadn't got her," says Greta.

"Yes, what with one thing and another," says Spencer.

Brendon does not say anything to this. He looks at Ryan, brow furrowed but seemingly at a loss until suddenly his face clears. He stands up decisively.

"We'll go to a church and pray for her," he says. He grasps Ryan's sleeve near the elbow, and drags him out with him, propelling him along the street. He stops at the door of a little church. "Papist, but never mind. They'll have candles," Brendon says, as if candles will answer the case. Ryan would like candles, when he comes to think of it.

Brendon lights one and puts it in front of Ryan. He gazes steadily into it until the church recedes. He thinks Brendon is praying. He thinks of that woman's soul as hard as he can. It is something real, tangible in the _real_ scheme of things, outside Ryan's small sphere of knowledge. Somewhere it is untouched by what Ryan did to her body, untouched now by the life of her body. Steady as the little flame, straight though quivering, with a core of white.

Ryan gazes at the flame and thinks next of purification and how he will never be able to stop feeling sorry for what he has done this night. Otherwise he will do it again and become estranged from himself; the person he is will be lost to him in a fate worse than that woman's.

When they leave, Ryan says, "How odd of you to rush me straight off to church. You  
still speak to God, do you? I'm not sure he'd have much to say to you."

"I don't know why I thought it would calm you down, but it did, didn't it?" says Brendon. "It's not even the right church. I don't think it was really a godly idea, it's just that God is very keen on people taking responsibility for what they've done wrong, and making sure they're better in the future. So you need to take a leaf out of His book."

"What high standards you have. If you expect me to resemble God, I think you're going to be disappointed."

"Oh, don't be such a fool. God has nothing to do with it, I'm interested in how _you're_ going to get on," says Brendon.

Ryan feels irritated about a lot of things suddenly, most of them to do with Brendon. But now is not the time to demand what Brendon is doing in Ryan's life. Though he wants to know; would he be here if they weren't in danger? Why would he think he was still here if they weren't?

Greta has gone to bed by the time they get back. The other three remain in the sitting room. Ryan and Spencer sit on one couch, Brendon sitting on the one facing it. Brendon stretches his leg out and scuffs his shoe on Ryan and Spencer's couch. Spencer sighs and looks at his fingernails, and Ryan stares at his knees. The other two know he can't go to sleep – both in the sense that he's not able to, all his senses still heightened from the blood, and in the sense that he really isn't allowed to be able to rest peacefully on this night. Cheerful topics of conversation are debarred for the same reason. So here they all are in the sitting room with nothing to do.

"Perhaps I could find something to read aloud," says Brendon.

"What, something _fitting_?" says Spencer in horror.

"Well, I don't know if I can find anything at all." He goes to look despite Ryan and Spencer's un-encouraging looks. Brendon comes back with a newspaper and a couple of volumes of poetry.

"_No_," says Ryan. As if he wants the newspaper; dense, tiresome tales of murder and politics and finance. And no to poetry, too. This is not the time for romanticism, and the enjoyment of pretty words.

"Does it matter what it is?" asks Brendon.

"I don't know why you think I want you to read to me at all," Ryan snaps. "You and Spencer can sit and think on your own sins, you know, if you're bored of mine."

Brendon goes off again. "The prayer-book or _Barchester Towers_?" he says.

"Oh, just read _Barchester Towers_," says Spencer.

Brendon opens the book, glares at Ryan, and begins to read. Ryan stares at him sourly, and when Brendon is not pursing his mouth piously, he is reading with florid, unnecessary animation.

"What if we play I-Spy for a bit?" says Spencer.

"Certainly not. You have moved beyond I-Spy," says Brendon. "That is a hen-hutch occupation. Listen to my voice and think of broad horizons."

Gloomily they settle to more of Brendon's voice. It is a good distraction, actually – when he begins to flag Ryan smirks at him, so he has to carry on, as if it is a contest. Spencer slumps into the corner of the sofa, and a little later his eyes close.

Brendon looks at him and lowers the book. He looks at Ryan.

"It's not just the moral implications that are making me feel strange, you know," Ryan says, interrupting Brendon at last. "It's all that blood. I can feel how hot it is inside me. It's like it's touching me, all the time, and I can't get away from it. And I'm sitting still, but only on purpose. I feel like I want to dance all night, like I've been captured by one of those gangs of bad fairies. Do you think bad fairy sounds better than vampire? I suppose it's the same thing, really."

"I think vampire is more accurate. You're a little big for a fairy," says Brendon.

"Oh, don't be so stupid, plenty of them are as big as humans—"

"You do know they don't exist, don't you? Oh, good grief, perhaps they do. Perhaps nothing is a story and it's all real," says Brendon.

"I don't know that I shall ever be able to sleep again," says Ryan, interrupting Brendon's thoughtful look.

Brendon looks a little as if he wouldn't put it past him, but says, "Perhaps you might rest your eyes for a while, it's getting light."

Ryan tips his head back into a more comfortable position and obediently closes his eyes. For a few moments he can hear the slight movements of Brendon's clothes, as Brendon looks at him and decides what to do next. Then he hears him shuffling off to bed, and tries not to feel bereft.

* *

When Ryan wakes up it is ten in the morning. As soon as he is awake he is full of a  
crushing anxiety. He hurries out to the kitchen.

"Is that the last of the milk?" Spencer demands of his beloved, watching Greta pour milk into her bowl of porridge.

She tips the jug upside down. A drip or two splashes down.

"And there isn't another jug anywhere? But you had your breakfast hours ago, that isn't fair!"

"You don't need to eat," Greta said. "And I'm keeping you company!"

"_I_ need to eat," says Brendon. "Oh, hello, Ryan. Are you alright?"

"I only bumped into William and Victoria _one_ street away from here," says Ryan. "I think they'll come knocking at doors and asking round again."

"There are a lot of doors between here and there," says Spencer. "And I think they  
will have given up now. You tasted the forbidden fruit, and you still told them to get lost. They certainly _ought_ to have given up. It's very idealistic of them, all this. How do they think it will make things any better if we go and play dead people with them?"

"But they _do_," says Ryan. "And I think they _like _ us, it's all so revolting."

"If only I'd been there last night I'm sure I could have managed to unendear us to them completely," says Spencer, frowning darkly.

"We could go out on the river!" says Brendon. "We could be out all day, and quite away from William and Victoria." He pauses. "I rather wish we had surnames for them. I don't really _want_ to be on Christian name terms with them."

"No, neither do I," says Spencer. "Anyway, yes, we can go out on the river today, but we can't do that every day. I'm starting to wish for a real solution. Either Saporta and William and Victoria can all die, or we could find somewhere far away from any of them."

"Maybe we could live on a barge," says Ryan. "I think that might actually be a good idea."

He goes to fetch his and Spencer's tinted spectacles, and sighs into the hall mirror as he puts them on. "I'm sure being in the sun all day will give me a terrible headache. And I am always convinced someone will point at me and say "There's something funny about you.'"

"All you have to do is keep your mouth closed and be consumptive, Ryan, it's perfectly simple," says Brendon. He squints at Ryan, slightly puzzled, in reference to the fact that today Ryan does not have much to worry about. He is still rosy from last night, not at all pale.

* *

While Brendon is dealing with the boat hire man, Ryan looks out at the shining expanse of the Thames, and something occurs to him. "Running water!" he exclaims. Brendon and the boat hire man look up momentarily before resuming their talk. Ryan shakes Spencer's arm. "There's something about running water and vampires. Or witches."

Spencer frowns and turns to look out over the water. "There is something isn't there? I wish I could remember what it was." He thought some more. "You know, I'm sure we must have crossed running water _somewhere_. You must have come across streams and things on all those walks . . . And taps, even."

"What was that?" Brendon asks, coming over.

"I'm worried about the running water," Ryan says. "I think it might reduce me to a pile of ash, or something."

Brendon and Greta both gaze dubiously at the river.

"I just don't see why it _would_," says Greta.

"Well, yes," says Brendon. "I'm sure it will be alright." He takes the wooden box Ryan is carrying, in which their picnic is contained, in lieu of a hamper, and hops into the boat. He and Greta clearly feel the subject has been exhausted. Ryan and Spencer stand on the verge, watching unhappily as Brendon and Greta make themselves comfortable.

"Well, come on, Ryan, might as well," says Spencer, pushing him forward. Ryan nearly falls into the river under his own steam as he tries to clamber into the boat with his eyes closed.

He arrives in the boat all in one piece, and feels a little foolish as he sits down. "I don't suppose being on a boat on the water counts."

Brendon laughs a little guiltily. "I've only gone boating twice, you know, and both times it was me that upended the boat. Just try very hard not to fall in, eh?"

Ryan glares at him with real anger at having being duped into trusting himself to such incompetent keeping.

The sun is warm as they go off down the river, though. Ryan can feel a light breeze at his neck. It is not like looking out of the window from a carriage or a train. They pass the banks and the other boats so slowly there is no need for Ryan to actually look at them; he has plenty of time to take the scenery in by accident. Squinting a little, he watches Brendon, who soon becomes unhappy about rowing and offers an oar to Spencer. For a while, they manage beautifully then suddenly become unsynchronised, and never regain the rhythm. Ryan watches Greta trying to organise Spencer's arms. He feels peaceful on the water. Replete, he thinks, which makes him think of last night. It may have had something to do with it.

The water looks like broad strokes of oil paint; black, white, blue, green and yellow. Or like rippling light. Ryan trails his fingers into a bright patch. It is wet, and the colour doesn't come off on his skin. And he is quite alright and intact, as the others ascertain when they glance at him quickly.

He opens the wooden crate where they have stored all the food they felt it necessary to bring with them, having run about obtaining it earlier in the morning. Ryan and Greta begin eating sandwiches and cakes, sitting back with the expression of those enjoying a nice day out. Brendon and Spencer feel deprived, and try to eat one-handed. Brendon drops half a sandwich in the water and is enraged.

"Look," he says. "We're near the bank again. Let's one of us tow for a bit. We can take turns."

"Can I tow?" says Ryan, momentarily struck by the misapprehension that it would be fun. Like running up and down the path when you were little, dragging your toy on wheels.

"I'll go, shall I?" says Spencer, and without waiting for an answer he leans heavily on Ryan and Brendon's shoulders, levering himself up onto the bank.

Some time later, the tow line is all tangled up with some young trees. Brendon gets out to help untangle it, climbs onto a bough, which breaks underneath him, and falls in the mud. Standing on one foot, he tries to recover the shoe of the other while shouting at Spencer. There are better tow lines in the world than theirs, which frays and breaks. Spencer wades into the shallows and ties both parts together, as Ryan and Greta stand up and stare in alarm at the slowly retreating bank. Secured once more, they sit and watch the other two quarrelling and tugging about until they stop watching, and are merely waiting until they can get on.

But then Ryan looks at Brendon's hand as it appears and disappears over his shoulder, while he gesticulates furiously. Ryan has seen that hand waving about like that before, under his nose, and there it is now. He's got _used_ to it now, and who knows how far Brendon will take his gestures into the rest of Ryan's life?

_I could put up with you_, he thinks. It seems odd, when so much of the reason he allowed things to start with Brendon was that he thought he couldn't, and therefore felt no pressure to do so. And perhaps in this minute he feels as if perhaps he could manage all the rest, the thinking of himself and Brendon together. As if he might stop being continually distracted by the reflection of himself held up to him by his introspection. Some of the self-consciousness has burned away. Just for now Ryan has his own space to stand in, and isn't rushing off to find others, and take in the view from there. Ryan thinks about what it would be like, admitting to Brendon – well, admitting anything. He feels he has something he might lay at Brendon's feet, but he is not sure what it is.

Ryan thinks he and Brendon have become simpler towards one another. He supposes that there is a question to ask himself. Simply because he _could_ put up with Brendon, is that any reason to actually try and do so?

Ryan thoughtfully carries around that knowledge that he _could_ manage being with Brendon now, and takes it home with him.

* *

The next day, Greta walks past William and Victoria sitting on a bench in the street. She stops and retraces her steps. She knows it is them because they are both wearing dark glasses, the man has teeth braided into strands of his hair and a lace ruff, and the woman has a dark red, old-fashioned dress and many strings of teeth around her neck. They look a little woebegone. It could be no one else.

Greta stands in front of them and bares her teeth. They stare at her blankly before baring their fangs in return, still nonplussed. "I'm not afraid of you. Even if you kill me, I shan't be afraid of you."

"Where are you _from_?" demands William, requiring context rather than geographical origin. Greta thinks that perhaps William has several sources for other people's aggrieved friends and relatives.

"Is there really no way of getting back once you're a vampire?" Greta asks. "No way at all of staying alive but not being a vampire?"

They frown at her. "You're not, are you?" says Victoria, almost certain.

"No, I am not," says Greta.

"Well, there's something involving a wizard," William says carelessly, quite as if he can hardly be troubled to make conversation, let alone menace.

"What does the wizard do?" says Greta, heart sinking but hope not dying at the silly word.

"They go into a trance together, and they both go to a place inside themselves on the shores of existence. The vampire's life will be found floating about round there, apparently. If they manage to take the life back into the body between them, the undeadness is slammed out. Apparently. _I've_ never met anyone who had it done. No, I tell a lie, I have done once, a long while ago," says Victoria.

Greta looks at them so that they can see her cynical face, but they don't seem interested. "Wouldn't you have done this – wouldn't _all_ vampires have done this, if it was real?"

"_No_," says William. "Or at least, no one _I_ know would spit in the face of the centuries before them, and trust their spirit to some ninny with illusions of grandeur. With whom it is probably perfectly safe anyway, to their chagrin. Tell Arthur to calm himself, why don't you?"

Greta doesn't know who Arthur is, or what about her suggests him, but she goes home without mentioning the vampires who seem to be nearer their hearts. Greta wonders if Victoria and William have made any other vampires besides Ryan and Spencer, and if they have, why they in particular mean so much. Or perhaps all these other vampires of their acquaintance have been made by someone else. Greta had mentioned the notion of a cure hardly able to believe either that one did exist or that it didn't, and cannot but be cheered even by this unenthusiastic rumour of wizards.

When she gets in, Spencer greets her with, "Mr Way has written to us."

"Our Mr. Way, not his brother? Oh! He can be a wizard!"

"What?"

"I'll tell you in a minute. It's very important, I have to tell you properly."

"I think we can go back to Ratfield if we want to. Mr Way had to tell the Bickways and everyone in the village not to mention us, which they all thought was very strange. So they have all been acting very strange themselves and it made him nervous, and he threw us on Saporta's mercy. Saporta is apparently furious with Mr Way and Miss Ballato, but his rage is a little confounded by the other Mr Way cheerfully admitting he knew all about it. Way claims that if we present ourselves, we will be safe and we can try and make a good impression so we will be safe in the future. I don't know."

"Oh, we have to go back, we need Mr Way to try something," says Greta, and proceeds to horrify Spencer and Ryan by saying, "I saw William and Victoria when I was out."

"Anything," says Ryan, as soon as he gets the gist. "I will try anything."

"Of course we'll try, it's hardly going to hurt. But really, Ryan, it won't do a thing. You know that."

Ryan looks as if he knows this, but would like to argue the point regardless. "Way can do _something_ in the medium line. Remember him talking about Marigold."

"So we're going back." Brendon picks up the letter. "It sounds like Saporta wants blood or a very great deal of justification from someone, you know. He must feel like a cat who was watching at the mouse-hole while the mice were playing in his basket."

* *

In the bustle of packing their things and speculating on what awaits them there is no time or place for anything in Ryan's head to develop into action. Because there are a lot of things in his head to do with Brendon, and he feels a little foolish again because of this. Because truly, it is not as though he suddenly thinks Brendon is _wonderful_. Every time he thinks of the matter the more it occurs to him that Brendon is only a run-of-the-mill young man from a wealthy family, cheerful because he has no reason not to be. But Brendon is familiar now, and Ryan likes the warmth he feels inside, that is indulgence towards Brendon. And Brendon brightens him up without leaving Ryan feeling like the negative and passive to his positive and active. He is too faulted to be glamorous, and that makes things better.

Ryan is impatient with his situation. He chooses to believe that he may well cease to be a vampire before the week is out, but he doesn't feel like waiting for change. He hangs around Brendon when he can, as being the other thing occupying his mind. Ryan thinks about throwing himself at Brendon's head to see what happens. He wants to send his feelings away from himself, to thrust his love and everything he is into Brendon's arms, careless of whether Brendon wants or deserves it, or if he is worthy enough to give it.

They travel to Stellhurst by train this time. Ryan sits opposite Brendon and thinks about beckoning him out to the corridor to talk, but somehow it doesn't seem suitable.

* *

Gabriel is highly dissatisfied with everything. He cannot comprehend everyone's composure and compliance in the face of these vampires. (In _his_ house.) They are all quite unrepentant, and seem to expect him to overcome his qualms, his prejudices against these creatures he has spent years trying to destroy. Gabriel cannot help feeling a little betrayed by Mikey in particular. It is not as if anything better was to be expected of Gerard and Miss Ballato. Indeed, Gabriel is seriously considering dismissing Miss Ballato and engaging a new governess, though he considers the engagement of any staff other than chambermaids a terrible chore.

He finds the Bickways and Mr. Walker, and rages at them. "You are always hanging over everything, how could you not have noticed these people were raging revenants?" Mr Walker looks somewhat depressed, but after the conversation goes a little further, Mr and Mrs Bickway turn a little astonished. They have the audacity to inform Gerard that they have previously been almost certain he was deluded, or speaking metaphorically. Now, thinking over those visitors, they are forced to come to an eye-opening conclusion and are unsure what ought to be the next step.

"I'll thank you to keep your noses out of it," Gabriel snaps, and leaves.

When he gets home he finds Gerard and Miss Ballato sitting on a window-seat together, smiling and talking in low voices. Surely they could be persuaded to marry, thinks Gabriel. He wonders if they would keep up the boarding house, and if perhaps Michael might live with him. He broaches the subject with Michael.

"Yes," says Michael. "I did ask about that, just in case Gerard had it in mind to ask her and was hanging back. He told me they were 'very much in love' and are merely enjoying the moment and getting on very nicely by themselves." Michael then says something unrelated about Alicia, and Gabriel realises that his house may not be the first port of call.

One night he lingers in the drawing room after everyone has retired for the night, and falls asleep on a sofa. He awakes on the impact of cold water and jumps into a sitting position to see Miss Ballato with her back to him, hanging onto an empty vase, calling out of the door, "Someone bring a pail of water!"

"Come away from the curtains!" she cries, turning round as Gabriel says, "There is nothing on _fire_."

He turns and sees the curtains, against which the sofa was pushed, all ate up with flame, and flames creeping across the fabric of the sofa back.

"I don't think the vase put out much besides your sleeve," says Miss Ballato.

"Why would the curtains suddenly burst into flame?" says Gabriel, as a servant enters with two pails of water. "Do not give me anything about spontaneous combustion, and those curtains were actually rather nice, now that I think of them." Is this not exactly the kind of dangerous trick, more a taunt than an attack, that an enemy would engage in? He sets off creeping around the lower floor, wondering if he will find Victoria and William sitting calmly somewhere. Or those whey-faced intruders, attempting to conceal themselves. Back at the drawing room, and Gerard bumps into him coming out of the door.

"I'm so sorry," Gerard says. "I left my pipe on the windowsill and that is what has set the furnishings alight. Perhaps I could reimburse you for the damage?"

This last is a vain hope with the best will in the world, and Gabriel ignores it. "Well, all is explained," he says, and tries not to say it resentfully.

"I think I shall sit in on a lesson," he tells Miss Ballato at breakfast. Miss Ballato has always had meals in the breakfast room or the dining room, though he was sure she was not supposed to, and he had never got round to sending her back to the nursery. Gerard has apparently been having breakfast and lunch there with her, but now that the master of the house is home that does not seem appropriate. Lacking Gerard's company and probably in her usual mysterious hopes of aggravating him, here she is in the breakfast room. "I wish to see their minds developing."

The prospect seems not to appeal to Miss Ballato overmuch. "I could give you my lesson plans, and tell you how I think they're getting on," she says.

"No, I think I'd prefer to observe for myself," Gabriel says.

He goes to change out of his wet clothes before adjourning to the schoolroom. In the corridor he meets Gerard, who says once more, "I'm very sorry about my pipe, you could have been _burnt up_."

"Not at all," Gabriel says, and finds that Gerard is absent-mindedly following him into the schoolroom. He stops, decides to stay and draws up a chair. Gabriel does likewise, and looks where Miss Ballato and Patrick are gazing in irritation. Peter is in the corner, crouched in a castle constructed from a blanket and a small table, and is answering the geography lesson in the character of a lonely prince.

"Peter, come and sit at the table," says Gabriel, gesturing imperiously at a chair. Peter cuts his eyes towards him before turning them to his own hands as he engages in mumbled, resentful sounding conversation with himself.

"Immediately!" says Gabriel. "I shall have to start training the two of you soon, and you must learn to do as you are told."

Everyone turns towards him and frowns. Peter comes towards the table.

"Training for what?" says Patrick suspiciously.

"You must learn to kill vampires like me. I've got the two of you lying about; as if I would choose not to put you to this vital work. With such an early start and all the experience you'll gain, you may even become better than myself."

"Well, that seems a little unfair," says Miss Ballato, looking very disapproving.

Peter says, with blank horror, "I thought we were to go to boarding school in the autumn."

"It is not as if this is any run-of-the-mill respectable trade we're discussing. It's highly specialised work, requiring a certain disposition. You may have been very good to them, but that is not quite reason enough to ask them to take this direction simply because it pleases you," says Miss Ballato.

"It's hunting! What boy doesn't want to hunt?" says Gabriel.

"I wish I wasn't your ward, I wish I was in the meanest orphanage, why can't I get on like a proper human being? Fighting evil is _hard_, I don't want to," says Peter, beginning to cry.

"And you'd want us to kill Ryan and Spencer, and we wouldn't," says Patrick.

"Certainly we wouldn't," agrees Peter.

"You've just reminded me," exclaims Gerard. "Gabriel, why _are_ they your wards?"

"How do you know neither of them are mine?" says Gabriel. "Complete lack of resemblance, perhaps?"

Patrick rolls his eyes. "Apparently my mother told Uncle Gabriel she _thought_ he was my father. And then she died."

"Peter was the child of a friend of hers, who having died left him in her care. They seemed attached to each other, so I ended up with both of them." Returning to the matter at hand, he asks Patrick and Peter, "Would you not like to be the best vampire hunters the world has seen? I am sure no one has started so young before, so you are being offered a very interesting opportunity."

Gerard seems to fear that his presence inflames Gabriel, when he begins decrying Peter and Patrick's lamentable recent influences, and slips out of the room. Some minutes later he comes running back into the room.

"They're here now! They're back!" he cries. "And they think they need me for something, it is all connected to the occult."

He runs back downstairs, and Gabriel says blankly, "_Who's_ back?" He finds the answer himself, seizes a sword from the wall and pounds down the hall, Miss Ballato and the children running after him crying, "Don't do anything _rash_!" and "Uncle, they're our friends!"

Just before Gabriel enters the drawing room downstairs, he hears Gerard say, "Perhaps you had better have this," and the first slice of the room he sees has Gerard's hand in it, pulling a sword off the wall and throwing it across the room. In the centre of the room stands a dark young man Gabriel does not recognise, and does not _think_ is a vampire. The sword flies in the direction of the sofa, on which there is a young man leaning back with his arms over his head. The non-vampire lets out a yell, but the sword sinks into the upholstery. He pulls it out, grasps the hilt and looks fierce. Next to the first young man on the sofa is another, and oh yes, they are vampires both. Gabriel gets distracted and gazes past the irritating young man in front of him to see the girl sitting next to the other young man.

"I know I know you from _somewhere_," he says.

The girl looks mildly perturbed, while the vampires look anxious and sheepish.

"You're not allowed to harm anyone," says Gerard, while the girl tries to explain something. "There's something we need to discuss."

The young man points his sword almost at Gabriel's throat. Gabriel jabs his sword at his neck in turn, irritated by the way he looks as if he is about to bare his teeth in a snarl, then drop his sword and run away. He pushes his sword up higher so that it grates against Gabriel's.

Michael walks in and says, "What's all this?"

"They're the vampires that were here before, and their friend. Can't you get those swords off them?" says Patrick.

"Why don't you just sit down for a while, Gabriel, and we can explain our point of view," says Michael. "You don't need to do anything rash. Could you take that sword away, it isn't really helping," he says to the vampires' friend.

"I know you will all think it sounds very silly and not want to spend time on it, but William and Victoria mentioned a way to un-vampire people. So we ought to try it," says Gerard.

"I thought you said they hated William and Victoria? What are they doing talking to them?" asks Gabriel.

"It was me, I met them in the street," says the girl.

"But who _are_ you?" says Gabriel.

"Greta Salpeter. I'm a housemaid here!"

"And you think I employ you to liase with vampires, do you? And why were _you_ talking to them?"

"It seemed like a shame to waste just seeing what they'd _say_ if I asked," says Greta.

"But anything they told you will be complete rubbish," says Gabriel.

"Well, it probably is," says the young man next to Greta. "It sounds like they just mentioned it in passing as the only thing they had heard on the subject. I don't think it's all a wicked misleading plot."

"But what is this supposed contrivance?"

"All it is is me, because I am a medium, and Mr Smith and Mr Ross entering a tranced state. It's like a spiritual quest – I, as the medium, am the quester, I presume. I _think_ vampires still have their soul, but it is like between us, we find where their soul is, and put it back into the body. So perhaps the body is fooled into thinking it is being reborn," says Gerard.

"If it worked, there wouldn't be any vampires," says Gabriel.

"Perhaps it isn't widely known," says one of the vampires, hopefully. "Perhaps most people are just more . . . _something_ than us, and _like_ being vampires."

"But if you get unvampire-ed, you'll die. Wouldn't you like to see what it's like in three hundred years' time?" asks Peter.

"Peter," says Gabriel, "to be undead is implicitly inferior to being either alive or dead. I wish you to understand that if nothing else. So," he says. "You're all going to say there is no excuse to kill them to free the world from the blight of evil, if the vampiric burden can be lifted from them without death."

"Yes," says Gerard. "Where do you think would be the best place to try and go into a trance in?"

Michael looks as if he is going to try and be kind. "But how good are you at being a medium? You make it sound like it's a bit uneven."

"Well, that is a good point," says Gerard. "I think I can go into a trance, but if it doesn't work then we should try again with someone else, just to see."

"I suppose a bedroom would be best," says Gabriel. "I imagine you will want to lie down, yes?"

They do, but when they start deliberating over bedrooms it occurs to them that they can't really fit three on a bed. Then they try to decide which bed should be moved to which room, and like all domestic decisions, it's more complicated than it ought to be.

"What about the gallery?" says Gerard. "I like it there, and we can just lie on the floor."

The gallery is flooded with light from a window, and it seems suitable. When the three of them are lying on the floor, shifting around a little, Greta says, "It won't hurt anyone, will it? If it's a real thing, but somehow goes wrong?"

One of the vampires aggressively stares at the ceiling at this idea, and the other says, "What did you have to make me think that for? Why do you think it would?"

"I was asking you! I'm sure it wouldn't," says Greta.

"Well, farewell in any case," he says, reaching to clumsily pat her hand.

"What about us?" asks Miss Ballato. "Should we stand or sit?"

Gerard peers up at her. "Maybe sitting would be less distracting. On chairs, though, so you're not too near. That would be distracting, too."

"We could always go away altogether, if it's so impossible to concentrate," says Gabriel. "No, as a matter of fact, we couldn't. For all I know, you could still simply be plotting to flee."

"We just _got_ here," says one of the vampires, as Miss Ballato and the vampires' friend go off in search of chairs.

When they are all settled, the three on the floor close their eyes. Gerard taps his hand against the floor and self-consciously breathes slow, deep breaths while they stare down at him, waiting. "Sing the Hallelujah Chorus," he says, after some minutes. Even Gabriel is feeling a little nervous now, and they all begin without question. The sound isn't very full, though, and Gerard indicates several times for them to raise the volume. When they seem to be performing to his satisfaction, he begins singing softly himself.

It takes a long time, and Gabriel is just about to say, "Perhaps you should try getting up and spinning round and round like those Turkish holy men," when it takes, and Gerard falls silent, his eyes screwed up though closed. His pulse, when Michael feels it, is still there but extremely slow. A moment later something seems to wipe clean the vampires' faces (on the inside). The Hallelujahs trail to a halt, and everyone stares uncertainly down.

"Can we play cards while we wait?" asks Peter, who has seemed more bored than excited by the enterprise for a while now.

And then over an hour passes. It is very dull. They try to be quiet, and glance guiltily down as if afraid of waking them. Peter and Patrick keep raising their voices just to see if it does. Gabriel keeps accidentally on purpose nudging one of the vampires with his foot until Michael frowns at him. Then the time grows thick with nerves rather than impatience. Mr Urie feels their pulses again.

Gabriel feels the weight on him, but he also feels a little excited. If they have gone and lost themselves it proves something interesting was happening. Then their bodies jerk back into time. One vampire pushes himself up on his hands, the other rises to his knees before rolling over and vomiting waves of blood.

"Did it," gasps Gerard. "'S' alright-" waving a hand towards the vampires. "They're making their own. Blood."

"You've come back!" says Patrick in relief.

The pool of blood trickles across the floor but only the children keep their feet out of it. The others lean in with reaching arms, in a passion of excited anxiety and curiosity.

"What's happened to you? Are you dying?" says Greta, shaking Smith's shoulders as he gasps for breath.

"Have you been somewhere?" asks Miss Ballato.

"A very, very long way," says Gerard, sitting up, waxen eyelids drooping.

Gabriel grasps the Ross creature by the shoulders and peers suspiciously at him. "Still got fangs," he pronounces.

"Well, he will, won't he, don't be a fool," says Mr Urie. "_I_ think they're going to be alright. They should all go to bed. Perhaps we could find some towels or something."

Both the vampires have a pinkish sheen to their skin as they sweat out blood. "Do they need more blood? Is this being human or are you just dying?" asks Greta, trying to hold Smith up.

"It's alright, it happened, it is real," says Ross, turning his face and seeming to search for Mr Urie, who he doesn't see for a while, being crouched by his head.

"You're sure? It's over?" says Mr Urie.

"We don't need to do anything else?" asks Miss Ballato.

"No. Over. I want to sleep . . ." Ross says.

"There must be some way we can test them," says Gabriel. "Perhaps we should duck them!"

"_No_," says Miss Ballato. "It wouldn't prove anything whether you drowned them or not. I am sure it is has worked."

Gerard is already asleep on the floor. Gabriel helps carry him to bed so he doesn't have to help with one of the… clerks, weren't ther? He has never been so cheated of his prey in his life. It's not as if he is allowed to complain, and he does feel happy about this wizarding enterprise, in a dim sort of way. But there were vampires living in his house, people he knows abetting them against him, and he never got to make them pay.

* *

  
Ryan wakes up when the room is grey with dawn. For a couple of minutes he feels completely lost and cannot remember what day it is or where he is. Isn't there something important just behind or just in front of him? He stirs a little and almost cries out at the ache. Ryan feels as if he has strained his muscles, and also had his insides pulverised. His insides throb in an unsettling smashed-to-grow sort of way. As soon as he remembers how things went he jumps to his feet, which was a terrible idea. There is no one in his room so he goes into the corridor, which is almost black, and Ryan realises the kind of grey in his room was still sleep-time grey, not the grey of evening falling. He stands and thinks about going back to his bed, to try to sleep or wait until morning but he needs to consult someone. He thinks there was someone in the room next to him when he was here before, but now he can't remember whether it was Brendon or Spencer.

Ryan pushes the door open and in the dim light he sees someone raise their head at the sound. It's Brendon.

"I feel so strange," Ryan whispers.

"Oh!" he says. "I wondered if you'd wake up; I kept going to check but then I fell asleep properly." He falls silent and looks at Ryan in the doorway before holding out his hand, not for Ryan to take it but beckoning him closer. Ryan sits on the bed.

"Did anything else happen after I got put to bed?" he asks.

"Of course not, how could it? You were the centre of the action. How are you? I mean, how do you feel, but are you different, do you know? Has everything actually changed?"

"I think . . . I think it might have. I feel so sick and bruised. But just now, I keep having memories of before I got Turned, as if being a vampire was like living in a different air and I never noticed until now. I think I've changed."

"But what happened when you were all unconscious?" asks Brendon.

"I can hardly remember it." Ryan tries to hug his knees; he's cold, but it hurts too much. "I did remember more just after, but it's like a dream. It was horrible anyway. Mr Way was the one doing it all, it was like he was climbing up a mountain and he kept making Spencer and me climb too. It was terribly hard work."

Brendon pulls back his bedclothes. "Were your souls at the top of the mountain?"

"I don't think so, though I may have forgotten. It was more like getting to the top of the mountain was the thing we had to go all that way for. Perhaps it was like you had to prove you wanted something that much. Maybe if you do want something that much that you go all that way you get it. And then we had to go all the way back down the mountain." Ryan slowly and carefully manoeuvres himself under the blankets. He lies with his face in Brendon's neck as Brendon turns towards him.

"Are you sure you're alright? It isn't still going to go horribly wrong?" says Brendon, trying not to get Ryan's hair in his mouth.

"I think I'm going to be alright," says Ryan.

* *

After a couple of dull sickroom days, Ryan and Spencer are at breakfast, as real live people. It is established now almost beyond the reach of caution that they are indeed real live people, despite reluctance to believe it in case it turned out not to be true. Saporta believes it too, now, and he cannot decide how to treat them. It's been a little awkward for everyone to get back to treating him like their gracious host, too, after ganging up on him on a life and death matter. The last two days, Ryan has not been very hungry, and has eaten nothing more than a little soup. Today he is eating a proper breakfast, and so is Spencer. They have not drunk any blood beforehand, nor will they drink any blood at all today, and Ryan is almost in love with that.

Brendon catches Ryan's eye, and Ryan's heart sinks. Because now he is simply ordinary, and that is something he hasn't had to deal with for a while. Maybe that is actually worse, in this situation, than being a vampire. Now all he has to give is not a great rush of poisoned blood (and heady, battered roses too, why not?) but a few dull, shabby odds and ends on a shelf inside him. He does not know that he can proffer them to Brendon in that gesture that belonged to the other self, that that other self really ought to have taken advantage of while he still had it. Now he is just a clerk in love with another young man his social superior and negotiations need to be redrawn from scratch. Ryan thinks that Brendon is going to push him to redraw them, though, and Ryan hopes he is, and feels glad though so nervous at the prospect. He's cowardly enough that he might never approach the matter at all.

Ryan walks out of the breakfast room slowly, and wanders into one of the reception rooms, aware of Brendon following him. Brendon shuts the door behind them and comes to stand close to Ryan.

"I hope you're not going to take this badly, because all I want is for you to _like_ me to say it," he says, low and serious. He stops and laughs awkwardly at himself, looking down at his splayed hands. "I love you," he says, looking up and just missing Ryan's eyes.

"I like you to say it. I love you too," says Ryan. He feels silly, but then he thinks that all in all he is a silly person, to whom silly things sometimes happen, and he may as well give up feeling self-conscious about it.

"Really? You don't need more time to think about it?" asks Brendon, looking taken aback.

"Not right now," says Ryan. Brendon is leaning towards his mouth and Ryan puts his arms around his neck and pulls him closer. Even if Brendon had got more than he bargained for, Ryan isn't going to be chivalrous now and drag it out by saying, "Are _you_ sure you're sure?" But Brendon is kissing him like he wants to be here, his finger stroking the line of his jaw.

They break apart to look at each other, eyebrows raised in question and answer before opening the door and wandering, casually, upstairs.

Brendon locks the door behind them and begins taking off his clothes. "I've only just got _out_ of bed," he says.

Ryan watches him and thinks, if this is settled, what else do I do now? He wonders where he will live and if he will go back to being a clerk. And now he has a really stupid idea in his head that he ought to tell Spencer, and he doesn't know how that will go. Brendon sits on the bed next to him and slips a hand under his shirt. Ryan tips his head back and smiles as he feels Brendon's warm hand slide over his ribs. He's alive! Then he tries to avoid getting caught up in that, and concentrate on Brendon. Brendon rubs his nipple with his thumb in between stroking up and down his torso.

Ryan pushes his hand away and begins to take his clothes off. Brendon puts a hand on the back of Ryan's neck and looks at him, drawing a breath like a nervous teacher facing a class. "We're going to be lovers. We will arrange everything, and it will all be alright between us. We're going to be happy."

Ryan nods and lies down, his hands on Brendon's shoulders pulling him down on top of him. He knows they're going to at least try, and that's the most important thing now.

* *

Jon hears that they are back, and comes by the house. Ryan comes to the drawing room to find that the children have got there first and are regaling Jon with their version of events. Most puzzled, he looks up as Ryan enters and shoos the children away.

"It's true," Ryan says. "Spencer and I aren't vampires anymore." Jon listens open-mouthed as Ryan repeats the tale.

"But you must be so relieved and happy," says Jon. "You _hated_ being a vampire."

"I did," Ryan agrees, smiling ruefully. "I'm much happier now."

"But I don't understand how Mr. Way could have done it. It's like a miracle," Jon says wonderingly.

"I suppose it was one," says Ryan. He supposes that really, in some respects the whole affair might have a revitalising effect upon a clergyman of lacklustre faith. He hesitates. "I don't know if I should tell you—"

"Yes?"

"I am happy now because of Brendon now, too," Ryan says. He supposes it is a little pompous of him to feel as if he is conferring an honour on Jon by confiding in him, but there it is.

"Oh! Well truly, I did wonder about the two of you. Well done for sorting things between you." Ryan flushes and thinks it is not exactly a credit to him that Jon speaks as if this is a feat, even if Jon is partly thinking of himself, too. "So now you have a new life ahead of you!" Ryan nods and smiles.

* *

Gerard and Lindsey sit on the lawn. It's a beautiful summer's day, soft with the scent of flowers and green, growing things on the breeze.

"I want to move on now. I think we could get married soon?" says Lindsey.

"Yes, I want to start something new now. I want to marry you and go off into the blue sky with you. Would you like to get married tomorrow? There's no reason why we shouldn't."

"Yes, I'd like that. It's eleven o'clock, I'm sure we could do everything we need to do. Perhaps I'll even have a dress, Miss Bickway might lend me hers," says Lindsey. She leans forward a little. "I'd like not to even know what we're going to do after we get married. I'd like to just come out of the church and go off somewhere."

"We'll have to hope we feel inspired by the ceremony and everything. And don't anticlimax and say, 'Ah never mind, let's go back to Ratfield.'" Gerard takes Lindsey's hand. "I'd like to think of something magnificent, so it would be like we come out of the church and go off on a quest or an adventure or something."

A little later they get up and wander off the lawn into the shrubbery. They discover a couple of benches in a leafy arbour. Gabriel sits on one, and William and Victoria sit on the other, staring intently back at him. Their heads shoot up, startled and discomfited, and Gerard and Lindsey swiftly leave the scene.

"What _do_ they want with each other?" mutters Lindsey as they walk off into the rest of their lives.

  
_fin_

  


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**In the Midst of Life 5/5**   
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